The Wings of the Dove, by Henry James

BOOK SIXTH

I

“I say, you know, Kate — you did stay!” had been Merton Densher’s punctual remark on their adventure after
they had, as it were, got out of it; an observation which she not less promptly, on her side, let him see that she
forgave in him only because he was a man. She had to recognise, with whatever disappointment, that it was doubtless the
most helpful he could make in this character. The fact of the adventure was flagrant between them; they had looked at
each other, on gaining the street, as people look who have just rounded together a dangerous corner, and there was
therefore already enough unanimity sketched out to have lighted, for her companion, anything equivocal in her action.
But the amount of light men did need! — Kate could have been eloquent at this moment about that. What,
however, on his seeing more, struck him as most distinct in her was her sense that, reunited after his absence and
having been now half the morning together, it behooved them to face without delay the question of handling their
immediate future. That it would require some handling, that they should still have to deal, deal in a crafty manner,
with difficulties and delays, was the great matter he had come back to, greater than any but the refreshed
consciousness of their personal need of each other. This need had had twenty minutes, the afternoon before, to find out
where it stood, and the time was fully accounted for by the charm of the demonstration. He had arrived at Euston at
five, having wired her from Liverpool the moment he landed, and she had quickly decided to meet him at the station,
whatever publicity might attend such an act. When he had praised her for it on alighting from his train she had
answered frankly enough that such things should be taken at a jump. She didn’t care today who saw her, and she profited
by it for her joy. To-morrow, inevitably, she should have time to think and then, as inevitably, would become a baser
creature, a creature of alarms and precautions. It was none the less for tomorrow at an early hour that she had
appointed their next meeting, keeping in mind for the present a particular obligation to show at Lancaster Gate by six
o’clock. She had given, with imprecations, her reason — people to tea, eternally, and a promise to Aunt Maud; but she
had been liberal enough on the spot and had suggested the National Gallery for the morning quite as with an idea that
had ripened in expectancy. They might be seen there too, but nobody would know them; just as, for that matter, now, in
the refreshment-room to which they had adjourned, they would incur the notice but, at the worst, of the unacquainted.
They would “have something” there for the facility it would give. Thus had it already come up for them again that they
had no place of convenience.

He found himself on English soil with all sorts of feelings, but he hadn’t quite faced having to reckon with a
certain ruefulness in regard to that subject as one of the strongest. He was aware later on that there were questions
his impatience had shirked; whereby it actually rather smote him, for want of preparation and assurance, that he had
nowhere to “take” his love. He had taken it thus, at Euston — and on Kate’s own suggestion — into the place where
people had beer and buns, and had ordered tea at a small table in the corner; which, no doubt, as they were lost in the
crowd, did well enough for a stop-gap. It perhaps did as well as her simply driving with him to the door of his
lodging, which had had to figure as the sole device of his own wit. That wit, the truth was, had broken down a little
at the sharp prevision that once at his door they would have to hang back. She would have to stop there, wouldn’t come
in with him, couldn’t possibly; and he shouldn’t be able to ask her, would feel he couldn’t without betraying a
deficiency of what would be called, even at their advanced stage, respect for her: that again was all that was clear
except the further fact that it was maddening. Compressed and concentrated, confined to a single sharp pang or two, but
none the less in wait for him there on the Euston platform and lifting its head as that of a snake in the garden, was
the disconcerting sense that “respect,” in their game, seemed somehow — he scarce knew what to call it — a fifth wheel
to the coach. It was properly an inside thing, not an outside, a thing to make love greater, not to make happiness
less. They had met again for happiness, and he distinctly felt, during his most lucid moment or two, how he must keep
watch on anything that really menaced that boon. If Kate had consented to drive away with him and alight at his house
there would probably enough have occurred for them, at the foot of his steps, one of those strange instants between man
and woman that blow upon the red spark, the spark of conflict, ever latent in the depths of passion. She would have
shaken her head — oh sadly, divinely — on the question of coming in; and he, though doing all justice to her refusal,
would have yet felt his eyes reach further into her own than a possible word at such a time could reach. This would
have meant the suspicion, the dread of the shadow, of an adverse will. Lucky therefore in the actual case that the
scant minutes took another turn and that by the half-hour she did in spite of everything contrive to spend with him
Kate showed so well how she could deal with things that maddened. She seemed to ask him, to beseech him, and all for
his better comfort, to leave her, now and henceforth, to treat them in her own way.

She had still met it in naming so promptly, for their early convenience, one of the great museums; and indeed with
such happy art that his fully seeing where she had placed him hadn’t been till after he left her. His absence from her
for so many weeks had had such an effect upon him that his demands, his desires had grown; and only the night before,
as his ship steamed, beneath summer stars, in sight of the Irish coast, he had felt all the force of his particular
necessity. He hadn’t in other words at any point doubted he was on his way to say to her that really their mistake must
end. Their mistake was to have believed that they could hold out — hold out, that is, not against Aunt Maud,
but against an impatience that, prolonged and exasperated, made a man ill. He had known more than ever, on their
separating in the court of the station, how ill a man, and even a woman, could feel from such a cause; but he struck
himself as also knowing that he had already suffered Kate to begin finely to apply antidotes and remedies and subtle
sedatives. It had a vulgar sound — as throughout, in love, the names of things, the verbal terms of intercourse, were,
compared with love itself, horribly vulgar; but it was as if, after all, he might have come back to find himself “put
off,” though it would take him of course a day or two to see. His letters from the States had pleased whom it
concerned, though not so much as he had meant they should; and he should be paid according to agreement and would now
take up his money. It wasn’t in truth very much to take up, so that he hadn’t in the least come back flourishing a
cheque-book; that new motive for bringing his mistress to terms he couldn’t therefore pretend to produce. The ideal
certainty would have been to be able to present a change of prospect as a warrant for the change of philosophy, and
without it he should have to make shift but with the pretext of the lapse of time. The lapse of time — not so many
weeks after all, she might always of course say — couldn’t at any rate have failed to do something for him; and that
consideration it was that had just now tided him over, all the more that he had his vision of what it had done
personally for Kate. This had come out for him with a splendour that almost scared him even in their small corner of
the room at Euston — almost scared him because it just seemed to blaze at him that waiting was the game of dupes. Not
yet had she been so the creature he had originally seen; not yet had he felt so soundly safely sure. It was all there
for him, playing on his pride of possession as a hidden master in a great dim church might play on the grandest organ.
His final sense was that a woman couldn’t be like that and then ask of one the impossible.

She had been like that afresh on the morrow; and so for the hour they had been able to float in the mere joy of
contact — such contact as their situation in pictured public halls permitted. This poor makeshift for closeness
confessed itself in truth, by twenty small signs of unrest even on Kate’s part, inadequate; so little could a decent
interest in the interesting place presume to remind them of its claims. They had met there in order not to meet in the
streets and not again, with an equal want of invention and of style, at a railway-station; not again, either, in
Kensington Gardens, which, they could easily and tacitly agree, would have had too much of the taste of their old
frustrations. The present taste, the taste that morning in the pictured halls, had been a variation; yet Densher had at
the end of a quarter of an hour fully known what to conclude from it. This fairly consoled him for their awkwardness,
as if he had been watching it affect her. She might be as nobly charming as she liked, and he had seen nothing to touch
her in the States; she couldn’t pretend that in such conditions as those she herself believed it enough to
appease him. She couldn’t pretend she believed he would believe it enough to render her a like service. It wasn’t
enough for that purpose — she as good as showed him it wasn’t. That was what he could be glad, by demonstration, to
have brought her to. He would have said to her had he put it crudely and on the spot: “Now am I to understand
you that you consider this sort of thing can go on?” It would have been open to her, no doubt, to reply that to have
him with her again, to have him all kept and treasured, so still, under her grasping hand, as she had held him in their
yearning interval, was a sort of thing that he must allow her to have no quarrel about; but that would be a mere
gesture of her grace, a mere sport of her subtlety. She knew as well as he what they wanted; in spite of which indeed
he scarce could have said how beautifully he mightn’t once more have named it and urged it if she hadn’t, at a given
moment, blurred, as it were, the accord. They had soon seated themselves for better talk, and so they had remained a
while, intimate and superficial. The immediate things to say had been many, for they hadn’t exhausted them at Euston.
They drew upon them freely now, and Kate appeared quite to forget — which was prodigiously becoming to her — to look
about for surprises. He was to try afterwards, and try in vain, to remember what speech or what silence of his own,
what natural sign of the eyes or accidental touch of the hand, had precipitated for her, in the midst of this, a sudden
different impulse. She had got up, with inconsequence, as if to break the charm, though he wasn’t aware of what he had
done at the moment to make the charm a danger. She had patched it up agreeably enough the next minute by some odd
remark about some picture, to which he hadn’t so much as replied; it being quite independently of this that he had
himself exclaimed on the dreadful closeness of the rooms. He had observed that they must go out again to breathe; and
it was as if their common consciousness, while they passed into another part, was that of persons who, infinitely
engaged together, had been startled and were trying to look natural. It was probably while they were so occupied — as
the young man subsequently reconceived — that they had stumbled upon his little New York friend. He thought of her for
some reason as little, though she was of about Kate’s height, to which, any more than to any other felicity in his
mistress, he had never applied the diminutive.

What was to be in the retrospect more distinct to him was the process by which he had become aware that Kate’s
acquaintance with her was greater than he had gathered. She had written of it in due course as a new and amusing one,
and he had written back that he had met over there, and that he much liked, the young person; whereupon she had
answered that he must find out about her at home. Kate, in the event, however, had not returned to that, and he had of
course, with so many things to find out about, been otherwise taken up. Little Miss Theale’s individual history was not
stuff for his newspaper; besides which, moreover, he was seeing but too many little Miss Theales. They even went so far
as to impose themselves as one of the groups of social phenomena that fell into the scheme of his public letters. For
this group in especial perhaps — the irrepressible, the supereminent young persons — his best pen was ready. Thus it
was that there could come back to him in London, an hour or two after their luncheon with the American pair, the sense
of a situation for which Kate hadn’t wholly prepared him. Possibly indeed as marked as this was his recovered
perception that preparations, of more than one kind, had been exactly what, both yesterday and today, he felt her as
having in hand. That appearance in fact, if he dwelt on it, so ministered to apprehension as to require some brushing
away. He shook off the suspicion to some extent, on their separating first from their hostesses and then from each
other, by the aid of a long and rather aimless walk. He was to go to the office later, but he had the next two or three
hours, and he gave himself as a pretext that he had eaten much too much. After Kate had asked him to put her into a cab
— which, as an announced, a resumed policy on her part, he found himself deprecating — he stood a while by a corner and
looked vaguely forth at his London. There was always doubtless a moment for the absentee recaptured — the
moment, that of the reflux of the first emotion — at which it was beyond disproof that one was back. His full
parenthesis was closed, and he was once more but a sentence, of a sort, in the general text, the text that, from his
momentary street-corner, showed as a great grey page of print that somehow managed to be crowded without being “fine.”
The grey, however, was more or less the blur of a point of view not yet quite seized again; and there would be colour
enough to come out. He was back, flatly enough, but back to possibilities and prospects, and the ground he now somewhat
sightlessly covered was the act of renewed possession.

He walked northward without a plan, without suspicion, quite in the direction his little New York friend, in her
restless ramble, had taken a day or two before. He reached, like Milly, the Regent’s Park; and though he moved further
and faster he finally sat down, like Milly, from the force of thought. For him too in this position, be it added — and
he might positively have occupied the same bench — various troubled fancies folded their wings. He had no more yet said
what he really wanted than Kate herself had found time. She should hear enough of that in a couple of days. He had
practically not pressed her as to what most concerned them; it had seemed so to concern them during these first hours
but to hold each other, spiritually speaking, close. This at any rate was palpable, that there were at present more
things rather than fewer between them. The explanation about the two ladies would be part of the lot, yet could wait
with all the rest. They were not meanwhile certainly what most made him roam — the missing explanations weren’t. That
was what she had so often said before, and always with the effect of suddenly breaking off: “Now please call me a good
cab.” Their previous encounters, the times when they had reached in their stroll the south side of the park, had had a
way of winding up with this special irrelevance. It was effectively what most divided them, for he would generally, but
for her reasons, have been able to jump in with her. What did she think he wished to do to her? — it was a question he
had had occasion to put. A small matter, however, doubtless — since, when it came to that, they didn’t depend on cabs
good or bad for the sense of union: its importance was less from the particular loss than as a kind of irritating mark
of her expertness. This expertness, under providence, had been great from the first, so far as joining him was
concerned; and he was critical only because it had been still greater, even from the first too, in respect to leaving
him. He had put the question to her again that afternoon, on the repetition of her appeal — had asked her once more
what she supposed he wished to do. He recalled, on his bench in the Regent’s Park, the freedom of fancy, funny and
pretty, with which she had answered; recalled the moment itself, while the usual hansom charged them, during which he
felt himself, disappointed as he was, grimacing back at the superiority of her very “humour,” in its added grace of
gaiety, to the celebrated solemn American. Their fresh appointment had been at all events by that time made, and he
should see what her choice in respect to it — a surprise as well as a relief — would do toward really simplifying. It
meant either new help or new hindrance, though it took them at least out of the streets. And her naming this privilege
had naturally made him ask if Mrs. Lowder knew of his return.

“Not from me,” Kate had replied. “But I shall speak to her now.” And she had argued, as with rather a quick fresh
view, that it would now be quite easy. “We’ve behaved for months so properly that I’ve margin surely for my mention of
you. You’ll come to see her, and she’ll leave you with me; she’ll show her good nature, and her lack of
betrayed fear, in that. With her, you know, you’ve never broken, quite the contrary, and she likes you as much as ever.
We’re leaving town; it will be the end; just now therefore it’s nothing to ask. I’ll ask to-night,” Kate had wound up,
“and if you’ll leave it to me — my cleverness, I assure you, has grown infernal — I’ll make it all right.”

He had of course thus left it to her and he was wondering more about it now than he had wondered there in Brook
Street. He repeated to himself that if it wasn’t in the line of triumph it was in the line of muddle. This indeed, no
doubt, was as a part of his wonder for still other questions. Kate had really got off without meeting his little
challenge about the terms of their intercourse with her dear Milly. Her dear Milly, it was sensible, was
somehow in the picture. Her dear Milly, popping up in his absence, occupied — he couldn’t have said quite why he felt
it — more of the foreground than one would have expected her in advance to find clear. She took up room, and it was
almost as if room had been made for her. Kate had appeared to take for granted he would know why it had been made; but
that was just the point. It was a foreground in which he himself, in which his connexion with Kate, scarce enjoyed a
space to turn round. But Miss Theale was perhaps at the present juncture a possibility of the same sort as the
softened, if not the squared, Aunt Maud. It might be true of her also that if she weren’t a bore she’d be a
convenience. It rolled over him of a sudden, after he had resumed his walk, that this might easily be what Kate had
meant. The charming girl adored her — Densher had for himself made out that — and would protect, would lend a hand, to
their interviews. These might take place, in other words, on her premises, which would remove them still better from
the streets. That was an explanation which did hang together. It was impaired a little, of a truth, by this
fact that their next encounter was rather markedly not to depend upon her. Yet this fact in turn would be accounted for
by the need of more preliminaries. One of the things he conceivably should gain on Thursday at Lancaster Gate would be
a further view of that propriety.

II

It was extraordinary enough that he should actually be finding himself, when Thursday arrived, none so wide of the
mark. Kate hadn’t come all the way to this for him, but she had come to a good deal by the end of a quarter of an hour.
What she had begun with was her surprise at her appearing to have left him on Tuesday anything more to understand. The
parts, as he now saw, under her hand, did fall more or less together, and it wasn’t even as if she had spent the
interval in twisting and fitting them. She was bright and handsome, not fagged and worn, with the general clearness;
for it certainly stuck out enough that if the American ladies themselves weren’t to be squared, which was absurd, they
fairly imposed the necessity of trying Aunt Maud again. One couldn’t say to them, kind as she had been to them: “We’ll
meet, please, whenever you’ll let us, at your house; but we count on you to help us to keep it secret.” They must in
other terms inevitably speak to Aunt Maud — it would be of the last awkwardness to ask them not to: Kate had embraced
all this in her choice of speaking first. What Kate embraced altogether was indeed wonderful today for Densher, though
he perhaps struck himself rather as getting it out of her piece by piece than as receiving it in a steady light. He had
always felt, however, that the more he asked of her the more he found her prepared, as he imaged it, to hand out. He
had said to her more than once even before his absence: “You keep the key of the cupboard, and I foresee that when
we’re married you’ll dole me out my sugar by lumps.” She had replied that she rejoiced in his assumption that sugar
would be his diet, and the domestic arrangement so prefigured might have seemed already to prevail. The supply from the
cupboard at this hour was doubtless, of a truth, not altogether cloyingly sweet; but it met in a manner his immediate
requirements. If her explanations at any rate prompted questions the questions no more exhausted them than they
exhausted her patience. And they were naturally, of the series, the simpler; as for instance in his taking it from her
that Miss Theale then could do nothing for them. He frankly brought out what he had ventured to think possible. “If we
can’t meet here and we’ve really exhausted the charms of the open air and the crowd, some such little raft in the
wreck, some occasional opportunity like that of Tuesday, has been present to me these two days as better than nothing.
But if our friends are so accountable to this house of course there’s no more to be said. And it’s one more nail, thank
God, in the coffin of our odious delay.” He was but too glad without more ado to point the moral. “Now I hope you see
we can’t work it anyhow.”

If she laughed for this — and her spirits seemed really high — it was because of the opportunity that, at the hotel,
he had most shown himself as enjoying. “Your idea’s beautiful when one remembers that you hadn’t a word except for
Milly.” But she was as beautifully good-humoured. “You might of course get used to her — you will. You’re
quite right — so long as they’re with us or near us.” And she put it, lucidly, that the dear things couldn’t
help, simply as charming friends, giving them a lift. “They’ll speak to Aunt Maud, but they won’t shut their
doors to us: that would be another matter. A friend always helps — and she’s a friend.” She had left Mrs. Stringham by
this time out of the question; she had reduced it to Milly. “Besides, she particularly likes us. She particularly likes
you. I say, old boy, make something of that.” He felt her dodging the ultimatum he had just made sharp, his
definite reminder of how little, at the best, they could work it; but there were certain of his remarks — those mostly
of the sharper penetration — that it had been quite her practice from the first not formally, not reverently to notice.
She showed the effect of them in ways less trite. This was what happened now: he didn’t think in truth that she wasn’t
really minding. She took him up, none the less, on a minor question. “You say we can’t meet here, but you see it’s just
what we do. What could be more lovely than this?”

It wasn’t to torment him — that again he didn’t believe; but he had to come to the house in some discomfort, so that
he frowned a little at her calling it thus a luxury. Wasn’t there an element in it of coming back into bondage? The
bondage might be veiled and varnished, but he knew in his bones how little the very highest privileges of Lancaster
Gate could ever be a sign of their freedom. They were upstairs, in one of the smaller apartments of state, a room
arranged as a boudoir, but visibly unused — it defied familiarity — and furnished in the ugliest of blues. He had
immediately looked with interest at the closed doors, and Kate had met his interest with the assurance that it was all
right, that Aunt Maud did them justice — so far, that was, as this particular time was concerned; that they should be
alone and have nothing to fear. But the fresh allusion to this that he had drawn from her acted on him now more
directly, brought him closer still to the question. They were alone — it was all right: he took in
anew the shut doors and the permitted privacy, the solid stillness of the great house. They connected themselves on the
spot with something made doubly vivid in him by the whole present play of her charming strong will. What it amounted to
was that he couldn’t have her — hanged if he could! — evasive. He couldn’t and he wouldn’t — wouldn’t have her
inconvenient and elusive. He didn’t want her deeper than himself, fine as it might be as wit or as character; he wanted
to keep her where their communications would be straight and easy and their intercourse independent. The effect of this
was to make him say in a moment: “Will you take me just as I am?”

She turned a little pale for the tone of truth in it — which qualified to his sense delightfully the strength of her
will; and the pleasure he found in this was not the less for her breaking out after an instant into a strain that
stirred him more than any she had ever used with him. “Ah do let me try myself! I assure you I see my way — so don’t
spoil it: wait for me and give me time. Dear man,” Kate said, “only believe in me, and it will be beautiful.”

He hadn’t come back to hear her talk of his believing in her as if he didn’t; but he had come back — and it all was
upon him now — to seize her with a sudden intensity that her manner of pleading with him had made, as happily appeared,
irresistible. He laid strong hands upon her to say, almost in anger, “Do you love me, love me, love me?” and she closed
her eyes as with the sense that he might strike her but that she could gratefully take it. Her surrender was her
response, her response her surrender; and, though scarce hearing what she said, he so profited by these things that it
could for the time be ever so intimately appreciable to him that he was keeping her. The long embrace in which they
held each other was the rout of evasion, and he took from it the certitude that what she had from him was real to her.
It was stronger than an uttered vow, and the name he was to give it in afterthought was that she had been sublimely
sincere. That was all he asked — sincerity making a basis that would bear almost anything. This settled so
much, and settled it so thoroughly, that there was nothing left to ask her to swear to. Oaths and vows apart, now they
could talk. It seemed in fact only now that their questions were put on the table. He had taken up more expressly at
the end of five minutes her plea for her own plan, and it was marked that the difference made by the passage just
enacted was a difference in favour of her choice of means. Means had somehow suddenly become a detail — her province
and her care; it had grown more consistently vivid that her intelligence was one with her passion. “I certainly don’t
want,” he said — and he could say it with a smile of indulgence —“to be all the while bringing it up that I don’t trust
you.”

“I should hope not! What do you think I want to do?”

He had really at this to make out a little what he thought, and the first thing that put itself in evidence was of
course the oddity, after all, of their game, to which he could but frankly allude. “We’re doing, at the best, in trying
to temporise in so special a way, a thing most people would call us fools for.” But his visit passed, all the same,
without his again attempting to make “just as he was” serve. He had no more money just as he was than he had had just
as he had been, or than he should have, probably, when it came to that, just as he always would be; whereas she, on her
side, in comparison with her state of some months before, had measureably more to relinquish. He easily saw how their
meeting at Lancaster Gate gave more of an accent to that quantity than their meeting at stations or in parks; and yet
on the other hand he couldn’t urge this against it. If Mrs. Lowder was indifferent her indifference added in a manner
to what Kate’s taking him as he was would call on her to sacrifice. Such in fine was her art with him that she seemed
to put the question of their still waiting into quite other terms than the terms of ugly blue, of florid Sèvres, of
complicated brass, in which their boudoir expressed it. She said almost all in fact by saying, on this article of Aunt
Maud, after he had once more pressed her, that when he should see her, as must inevitably soon happen, he would
understand. “Do you mean,” he asked at this, “that there’s any definite sign of her coming round? I’m not
talking,” he explained, “of mere hypocrisies in her, or mere brave duplicities. Remember, after all, that supremely
clever as we are, and as strong a team, I admit, as there is going — remember that she can play with us quite as much
as we play with her.”

“She doesn’t want to play with me, my dear,” Kate lucidly replied; “she doesn’t want to make me suffer a
bit more than she need. She cares for me too much, and everything she does or doesn’t do has a value. This has
a value — her being as she has been about us today. I believe she’s in her room, where she’s keeping strictly to
herself while you’re here with me. But that isn’t ‘playing’— not a bit.”

“What is it then,” the young man returned —“from the moment it isn’t her blessing and a cheque?”

Kate was complete. “It’s simply her absence of smallness. There is something in her above trifles. She
generally trusts us; she doesn’t propose to hunt us into corners; and if we frankly ask for a thing — why,”
said Kate, “she shrugs, but she lets it go. She has really but one fault — she’s indifferent, on such ground as she has
taken about us, to details. However,” the girl cheerfully went on, “it isn’t in detail we fight her.”

“It seems to me,” Densher brought out after a moment’s thought of this, “that it’s in detail we deceive her”— a
speech that, as soon as he had uttered it, applied itself for him, as also visibly for his companion, to the afterglow
of their recent embrace.

Any confusion attaching to this adventure, however, dropped from Kate, whom, as he could see with sacred joy, it
must take more than that to make compunctious. “I don’t say we can do it again. I mean,” she explained, “meet
here.”

Densher indeed had been wondering where they could do it again. If Lancaster Gate was so limited that issue
reappeared. “I mayn’t come back at all?”

“Certainly — to see her. It’s she, really,” his companion smiled, “who’s in love with you.”

But it made him — a trifle more grave — look at her a moment. “Don’t make out, you know, that every one’s in love
with me.”

She hesitated. “I don’t say every one.”

“You said just now Miss Theale.”

“I said she liked you — yes.”

“Well, it comes to the same thing.” With which, however, he pursued: “Of course I ought to thank Mrs. Lowder in
person. I mean for this — as from myself.”

“Ah but, you know, not too much!” She had an ironic gaiety for the implications of his “this,” besides wishing to
insist on a general prudence. “She’ll wonder what you’re thanking her for!”

Densher did justice to both considerations. “Yes, I can’t very well tell her all.”

It was perhaps because he said it so gravely that Kate was again in a manner amused. Yet she gave out light. “You
can’t very well ‘tell’ her anything, and that doesn’t matter. Only be nice to her. Please her; make her see how clever
you are — only without letting her see that you’re trying. If you’re charming to her you’ve nothing else to do.”

But she oversimplified too. “I can be ‘charming’ to her, so far as I see, only by letting her suppose I give you up
— which I’ll be hanged if I do! It is,” he said with feeling, “a game.”

“Of course it’s a game. But she’ll never suppose you give me up — or I give you — if you keep reminding her
how you enjoy our interviews.”

“Then if she has to see us as obstinate and constant,” Densher asked, “what good does it do?”

Kate looked at him hard again, disappointed at his want of consistency; but it appeared to determine in her
something better than a mere complaint. “Then I can! Leave it to me.” With which she came to him under the
compulsion, again, that had united them shortly before, and took hold of him in her urgency to the same tender purpose.
It was her form of entreaty renewed and repeated, which made after all, as he met it, their great fact clear. And it
somehow clarified all things so to possess each other. The effect of it was that, once more, on these terms,
he could only be generous. He had so on the spot then left everything to her that she reverted in the course of a few
moments to one of her previous — and as positively seemed — her most precious ideas. “You accused me just now of saying
that Milly’s in love with you. Well, if you come to that, I do say it. So there you are. That’s the good she’ll do us.
It makes a basis for her seeing you — so that she’ll help us to go on.”

Densher stared — she was wondrous all round. “And what sort of a basis does it make for my seeing her?”

“Oh I don’t mind!” Kate smiled.

“Don’t mind my leading her on?”

She put it differently. “Don’t mind her leading you.”

“Well, she won’t — so it’s nothing not to mind. But how can that ‘help,’” he pursued, “with what she knows?”

“What she knows? That needn’t prevent.”

He wondered. “Prevent her loving us?”

“Prevent her helping you. She’s like that,” Kate Croy explained.

It took indeed some understanding. “Making nothing of the fact that I love another?”

“Making everything,” said Kate. “To console you.”

“But for what?”

“For not getting your other.”

He continued to stare. “But how does she know —?”

“That you won’t get her? She doesn’t; but on the other hand she doesn’t know you will. Meanwhile she sees
you baffled, for she knows of Aunt Maud’s stand. That”— Kate was lucid —“gives her the chance to be nice to
you.”

“And what does it give me,” the young man none the less rationally asked, “the chance to be? A brute of a
humbug to her?”

Kate so possessed her facts, as it were, that she smiled at his violence. “You’ll extraordinarily like her. She’s
exquisite. And there are reasons. I mean others.”

“What others?”

“Well, I’ll tell you another time. Those I give you,” the girl added, “are enough to go on with.”

“To go on to what?”

“Why, to seeing her again — say as soon as you can: which, moreover, on all grounds, is no more than decent of
you.”

He of course took in her reference, and he had fully in mind what had passed between them in New York. It had been
no great quantity, but it had made distinctly at the time for his pleasure; so that anything in the nature of an appeal
in the name of it could have a slight kindling consequence. “Oh I shall naturally call again without delay. Yes,” said
Densher, “her being in love with me is nonsense; but I must, quite independently of that, make every acknowledgement of
favours received.”

It appeared practically all Kate asked. “Then you see. I shall meet you there.”

“I don’t quite see,” he presently returned, “why she should wish to receive you for it.”

“She receives me for myself — that is for her self. She thinks no end of me. That I should have to drum it
into you!”

Yet still he didn’t take it. “Then I confess she’s beyond me.”

Well, Kate could but leave it as she saw it. “She regards me as already — in these few weeks — her dearest friend.
It’s quite separate. We’re in, she and I, ever so deep.” And it was to confirm this that, as if it had flashed upon her
that he was somewhere at sea, she threw out at last her own real light. “She doesn’t of course know I care for
you. She thinks I care so little that it’s not worth speaking of.” That he had been somewhere at sea these
remarks made quickly clear, and Kate hailed the effect with surprise. “Have you been supposing that she does know
—?”

“About our situation? Certainly, if you’re such friends as you show me — and if you haven’t otherwise represented it
to her.” She uttered at this such a sound of impatience that he stood artlessly vague. “You have denied it to
her?”

She threw up her arms at his being so backward. “‘Denied it’? My dear man, we’ve never spoken of you.”

“Never, never?”

“Strange as it may appear to your glory — never.”

He couldn’t piece it together. “But won’t Mrs. Lowder have spoken?”

“Very probably. But of you. Not of me.”

This struck him as obscure. “How does she know me but as part and parcel of you?”

“How?” Kate triumphantly asked. “Why exactly to make nothing of it, to have nothing to do with it, to stick
consistently to her line about it. Aunt Maud’s line is to keep all reality out of our relation — that is out of my
being in danger from you — by not having so much as suspected or heard of it. She’ll get rid of it, as she believes, by
ignoring it and sinking it — if she only does so hard enough. Therefore she, in her manner, ‘denies’ it if you
will. That’s how she knows you otherwise than as part and parcel of me. She won’t for a moment have allowed either to
Mrs. Stringham or to Milly that I’ve in any way, as they say, distinguished you.”

“And you don’t suppose,” said Densher, “that they must have made it out for themselves?”

“No, my dear, I don’t; not even,” Kate declared, “after Milly’s so funnily bumping against us on Tuesday.”

“She doesn’t see from that —?”

“That you’re, so to speak, mad about me. Yes, she sees, no doubt, that you regard me with a complacent eye — for you
show it, I think, always too much and too crudely. But nothing beyond that. I don’t show it too much; I don’t perhaps —
to please you completely where others are concerned — show it enough.”

“Can you show it or not as you like?” Densher demanded.

It pulled her up a little, but she came out resplendent. “Not where you are concerned. Beyond seeing that
you’re rather gone,” she went on, “Milly only sees that I’m decently good to you.”

“Then I explain.” She was really fine; it came back to her essential plea for her freedom of action and his beauty
of trust. “I mean,” she added, “I will explain.”

“And what will I do?”

“Recognise the difference it must make if she thinks.” But here in truth Kate faltered. It was his silence alone
that, for the moment, took up her apparent meaning; and before he again spoke she had returned to remembrance and
prudence. They were now not to forget that, Aunt Maud’s liberality having put them on their honour, they mustn’t spoil
their case by abusing it. He must leave her in time; they should probably find it would help them. But she came back to
Milly too. “Mind you go to see her.”

Densher still, however, took up nothing of this. “Then I may come again?”

“For Aunt Maud — as much as you like. But we can’t again,” said Kate, “play her this trick. I can’t see you
here alone.”

“Then where?”

“Go to see Milly,” she for all satisfaction repeated.

“And what good will that do me?”

“Try it and you’ll see.”

“You mean you’ll manage to be there?” Densher asked. “Say you are, how will that give us privacy?”

“Try it — you’ll see,” the girl once more returned. “We must manage as we can.”

“That’s precisely what I feel. It strikes me we might manage better.” His idea of this was a thing that
made him an instant hesitate; yet he brought it out with conviction. “Why won’t you come to me?”

It was a question her troubled eyes seemed to tell him he was scarce generous in expecting her definitely to answer,
and by looking to him to wait at least she appealed to something that she presently made him feel as his pity. It was
on that special shade of tenderness that he thus found himself thrown back; and while he asked of his spirit and of his
flesh just what concession they could arrange she pressed him yet again on the subject of her singular remedy for their
embarrassment. It might have been irritating had she ever struck him as having in her mind a stupid corner. “You’ll
see,” she said, “the difference it will make.”

Well, since she wasn’t stupid she was intelligent; it was he who was stupid — the proof of which was that he would
do what she liked. But he made a last effort to understand, her allusion to the “difference” bringing him round to it.
He indeed caught at something subtle but strong even as he spoke. “Is what you meant a moment ago that the difference
will be in her being made to believe you hate me?”

Kate, however, had simply, for this gross way of putting it, one of her more marked shows of impatience; with which
in fact she sharply closed their discussion. He opened the door on a sign from her, and she accompanied him to the top
of the stairs with an air of having so put their possibilities before him that questions were idle and doubts perverse.
“I verily believe I shall hate you if you spoil for me the beauty of what I see!”

III

He was really, notwithstanding, to hear more from her of what she saw; and the very next occasion had for him still
other surprises than that. He received from Mrs. Lowder on the morning after his visit to Kate the telegraphic
expression of a hope that he might be free to dine with them that evening; and his freedom affected him as fortunate
even though in some degree qualified by her missive. “Expecting American friends whom I’m so glad to find you know!”
His knowledge of American friends was clearly an accident of which he was to taste the fruit to the last bitterness.
This apprehension, however, we hasten to add, enjoyed for him, in the immediate event, a certain merciful shrinkage;
the immediate event being that, at Lancaster Gate, five minutes after his due arrival, prescribed him for eight-thirty,
Mrs. Stringham came in alone. The long daylight, the postponed lamps, the habit of the hour, made dinners late and
guests still later; so that, punctual as he was, he had found Mrs. Lowder alone, with Kate herself not yet in the
field. He had thus had with her several bewildering moments — bewildering by reason, fairly, of their tacit invitation
to him to be supernaturally simple. This was exactly, goodness knew, what he wanted to be; but he had never had it so
largely and freely — so supernaturally simply, for that matter — imputed to him as of easy achievement. It was
a particular in which Aunt Maud appeared to offer herself as an example, appeared to say quite agreeably: “What I want
of you, don’t you see? is to be just exactly as I am.” The quantity of the article required was what might
especially have caused him to stagger — he liked so, in general, the quantities in which Mrs. Lowder dealt. He would
have liked as well to ask her how feasible she supposed it for a poor young man to resemble her at any point; but he
had after all soon enough perceived that he was doing as she wished by letting his wonder show just a little as silly.
He was conscious moreover of a small strange dread of the results of discussion with her — strange, truly, because it
was her good nature, not her asperity, that he feared. Asperity might have made him angry — in which there was always a
comfort; good nature, in his conditions, had a tendency to make him ashamed — which Aunt Maud indeed, wonderfully,
liking him for himself, quite struck him as having guessed. To spare him therefore she also avoided discussion; she
kept him down by refusing to quarrel with him. This was what she now proposed to him to enjoy, and his secret
discomfort was his sense that on the whole it was what would best suit him. Being kept down was a bore, but his great
dread, verily, was of being ashamed, which was a thing distinct; and it mattered but little that he was ashamed of that
too. It was of the essence of his position that in such a house as this the tables could always be turned on him. “What
do you offer, what do you offer?”— the place, however muffled in convenience and decorum, constantly hummed for him
with that thick irony. The irony was a renewed reference to obvious bribes, and he had already seen how little aid came
to him from denouncing the bribes as ugly in form. That was what the precious metals — they alone — could afford to be;
it was vain enough for him accordingly to try to impart a gloss to his own comparative brummagem. The humiliation of
this impotence was precisely what Aunt Maud sought to mitigate for him by keeping him down; and as her effort to that
end had doubtless never yet been so visible he had probably never felt so definitely placed in the world as while he
waited with her for her half-dozen other guests. She welcomed him genially back from the States, as to his view of
which her few questions, though not coherent, were comprehensive, and he had the amusement of seeing in her, as through
a clear glass, the outbreak of a plan and the sudden consciousness of a curiosity. She became aware of America, under
his eyes, as a possible scene for social operations; the idea of a visit to the wonderful country had clearly but just
occurred to her, yet she was talking of it, at the end of a minute, as her favourite dream. He didn’t believe in it,
but he pretended to; this helped her as well as anything else to treat him as harmless and blameless. She was so
engaged, with the further aid of a complete absence of allusions, when the highest effect was given her method by the
beautiful entrance of Kate. The method therefore received support all round, for no young man could have been less
formidable than the person to the relief of whose shyness her niece ostensibly came. The ostensible, in Kate, struck
him altogether, on this occasion, as prodigious; while scarcely less prodigious, for that matter, was his own reading,
on the spot, of the relation between his companions — a relation lighted for him by the straight look, not exactly
loving nor lingering, yet searching and soft, that, on the part of their hostess, the girl had to reckon with as she
advanced. It took her in from head to foot, and in doing so it told a story that made poor Densher again the least bit
sick: it marked so something with which Kate habitually and consummately reckoned.

That was the story — that she was always, for her beneficent dragon, under arms; living up, every hour, but
especially at festal hours, to the “value” Mrs. Lowder had attached to her. High and fixed, this estimate ruled on each
occasion at Lancaster Gate the social scene; so that he now recognised in it something like the artistic idea, the
plastic substance, imposed by tradition, by genius, by criticism, in respect to a given character, on a distinguished
actress. As such a person was to dress the part, to walk, to look, to speak, in every way to express, the part, so all
this was what Kate was to do for the character she had undertaken, under her aunt’s roof, to represent. It was made up,
the character, of definite elements and touches — things all perfectly ponderable to criticism; and the way for her to
meet criticism was evidently at the start to be sure her make-up had had the last touch and that she looked at least no
worse than usual. Aunt Maud’s appreciation of that to-night was indeed managerial, and the performer’s own contribution
fairly that of the faultless soldier on parade. Densher saw himself for the moment as in his purchased stall at the
play; the watchful manager was in the depths of a box and the poor actress in the glare of the footlights. But she
passed, the poor performer — he could see how she always passed; her wig, her paint, her jewels, every mark of
her expression impeccable, and her entrance accordingly greeted with the proper round of applause. Such impressions as
we thus note for Densher come and go, it must be granted, in very much less time than notation demands; but we may none
the less make the point that there was, still further, time among them for him to feel almost too scared to take part
in the ovation. He struck himself as having lost, for the minute, his presence of mind — so that in any case he only
stared in silence at the older woman’s technical challenge and at the younger one’s disciplined face. It was as if the
drama — it thus came to him, for the fact of a drama there was no blinking — was between them, them quite
preponderantly; with Merton Densher relegated to mere spectatorship, a paying place in front, and one of the most
expensive. This was why his appreciation had turned for the instant to fear — had just turned, as we have said, to
sickness; and in spite of the fact that the disciplined face did offer him over the footlights, as he believed, the
small gleam, fine faint but exquisite, of a special intelligence. So might a practised performer, even when raked by
double-barrelled glasses, seem to be all in her part and yet convey a sign to the person in the house she loved
best.

The drama, at all events, as Densher saw it, meanwhile went on — amplified soon enough by the advent of two other
guests, stray gentlemen both, stragglers in the rout of the season, who visibly presented themselves to Kate during the
next moments as subjects for a like impersonal treatment and sharers in a like usual mercy. At opposite ends of the
social course, they displayed, in respect to the “figure” that each, in his way, made, one the expansive, the other the
contractile effect of the perfect white waistcoat. A scratch company of two innocuous youths and a pacified veteran was
therefore what now offered itself to Mrs. Stringham, who rustled in a little breathless and full of the compunction of
having had to come alone. Her companion, at the last moment, had been indisposed — positively not well enough, and so
had packed her off, insistently, with excuses, with wild regrets. This circumstance of their charming friend’s illness
was the first thing Kate took up with Densher on their being able after dinner, without bravado, to have ten minutes
“naturally,” as she called it — which wasn’t what he did — together; but it was already as if the young man
had, by an odd impression, throughout the meal, not been wholly deprived of Miss Theale’s participation. Mrs. Lowder
had made dear Milly the topic, and it proved, on the spot, a topic as familiar to the enthusiastic younger as to the
sagacious older man. Any knowledge they might lack Mrs. Lowder’s niece was moreover alert to supply, while Densher
himself was freely appealed to as the most privileged, after all, of the group. Wasn’t it he who had in a manner
invented the wonderful creature — through having seen her first, caught her in her native jungle? Hadn’t he more or
less paved the way for her by his prompt recognition of her rarity, by preceding her, in a friendly spirit — as he had
the “ear” of society — with a sharp flashlight or two?

He met, poor Densher, these enquiries as he could, listening with interest, yet with discomfort; wincing in
particular, dry journalist as he was, to find it seemingly supposed of him that he had put his pen — oh his “pen!”— at
the service of private distinction. The ear of society? — they were talking, or almost, as if he had publicly
paragraphed a modest young lady. They dreamt dreams, in truth, he appeared to perceive, that fairly waked him
up, and he settled himself in his place both to resist his embarrassment and to catch the full revelation. His
embarrassment came naturally from the fact that if he could claim no credit for Miss Theale’s success, so neither could
he gracefully insist on his not having been concerned with her. What touched him most nearly was that the occasion took
on somehow the air of a commemorative banquet, a feast to celebrate a brilliant if brief career. There was of course
more said about the heroine than if she hadn’t been absent, and he found himself rather stupefied at the range of
Milly’s triumph. Mrs. Lowder had wonders to tell of it; the two wearers of the waistcoat, either with sincerity or with
hypocrisy, professed in the matter an equal expertness; and Densher at last seemed to know himself in presence of a
social “case.” It was Mrs. Stringham, obviously, whose testimony would have been most invoked hadn’t she been, as her
friend’s representative, rather confined to the function of inhaling the incense; so that Kate, who treated her
beautifully, smiling at her, cheering and consoling her across the table, appeared benevolently both to speak and to
interpret for her. Kate spoke as if she wouldn’t perhaps understand their way of appreciating Milly, but would
let them none the less, in justice to their good will, express it in their coarser fashion. Densher himself wasn’t
unconscious in respect to this of a certain broad brotherhood with Mrs. Stringham; wondering indeed, while he followed
the talk, how it might move American nerves. He had only heard of them before, but in his recent tour he had caught
them in the remarkable fact, and there was now a moment or two when it came to him that he had perhaps — and not in the
way of an escape — taken a lesson from them. They quivered, clearly, they hummed and drummed, they leaped and bounded
in Mrs. Stringham’s typical organism — this lady striking him as before all things excited, as, in the native phrase,
keyed-up, to a perception of more elements in the occasion than he was himself able to count. She was accessible to
sides of it, he imagined, that were as yet obscure to him; for, though she unmistakeably rejoiced and soared, he none
the less saw her at moments as even more agitated than pleasure required. It was a state of emotion in her that could
scarce represent simply an impatience to report at home. Her little dry New England brightness — he had “sampled” all
the shades of the American complexity, if complexity it were — had its actual reasons for finding relief most in
silence; so that before the subject was changed he perceived (with surprise at the others) that they had given her
enough of it. He had quite had enough of it himself by the time he was asked if it were true that their friend had
really not made in her own country the mark she had chalked so large in London. It was Mrs. Lowder herself who
addressed him that enquiry; while he scarce knew if he were the more impressed with her launching it under Mrs.
Stringham’s nose or with her hope that he would allow to London the honour of discovery. The less expansive of the
white waistcoats propounded the theory that they saw in London — for all that was said — much further than in the
States: it wouldn’t be the first time, he urged, that they had taught the Americans to appreciate (especially when it
was funny) some native product. He didn’t mean that Miss Theale was funny — though she was weird, and this was
precisely her magic; but it might very well be that New York, in having her to show, hadn’t been aware of its luck.
There were plenty of people who were nothing over there and yet were awfully taken up in England; just as — to
make the balance right, thank goodness — they sometimes sent out beauties and celebrities who left the Briton cold. The
Briton’s temperature in truth wasn’t to be calculated — a formulation of the matter that was not reached, however,
without producing in Mrs. Stringham a final feverish sally. She announced that if the point of view for a proper
admiration of her young friend had seemed to fail a little in New York, there was no manner of doubt of her
having carried Boston by storm. It pointed the moral that Boston, for the finer taste, left New York nowhere; and the
good lady, as the exponent of this doctrine — which she set forth at a certain length — made, obviously, to Densher’s
mind, her nearest approach to supplying the weirdness in which Milly’s absence had left them deficient. She made it
indeed effective for him by suddenly addressing him. “You know nothing, sir — but not the least little bit — about my
friend.”

He hadn’t pretended he did, but there was a purity of reproach in Mrs. Stringham’s face and tone, a purity charged
apparently with solemn meanings; so that for a little, small as had been his claim, he couldn’t but feel that she
exaggerated. He wondered what she did mean, but while doing so he defended himself. “I certainly don’t know enormously
much — beyond her having been most kind to me, in New York, as a poor bewildered and newly landed alien, and my having
tremendously appreciated it.” To which he added, he scarce knew why, what had an immediate success. “Remember, Mrs.
Stringham, that you weren’t then present.”

“Ah there you are!” said Kate with much gay expression, though what it expressed he failed at the time to make
out.

It made the little woman, he could see, really lose her head. She had more things in that head than any of them in
any other; unless perhaps it were Kate, whom he felt as indirectly watching him during this foolish passage, though it
pleased him — and because of the foolishness — not to meet her eyes. He met Mrs. Stringham’s, which affected him: with
her he could on occasion clear it up — a sense produced by the mute communion between them and really the beginning, as
the event was to show, of something extraordinary. It was even already a little the effect of this communion that Mrs.
Stringham perceptibly faltered in her retort to Mrs. Lowder’s joke. “Oh it’s precisely my point that Mr. Densher
can’t have had vast opportunities.” And then she smiled at him. “I wasn’t away, you know, long.”

It made everything, in the oddest way in the world, immediately right for him. “And I wasn’t there long,
either.” He positively saw with it that nothing for him, so far as she was concerned, would again be wrong. “She’s
beautiful, but I don’t say she’s easy to know.”

“Ah she’s a thousand and one things!” replied the good lady, as if now to keep well with him.

He asked nothing better. “She was off with you to these parts before I knew it. I myself was off too — away off to
wonderful parts, where I had endlessly more to see.”

“No, of course I didn’t forget her. One doesn’t forget such charming impressions. But I never,” he lucidly
maintained, “chattered to others about her.”

“She’ll thank you for that, sir,” said Mrs. Stringham with a flushed firmness.

“Yet doesn’t silence in such a case,” Aunt Maud blandly enquired, “very often quite prove the depth of the
impression?”

He would have been amused, hadn’t he been slightly displeased, at all they seemed desirous to fasten on him. “Well,
the impression was as deep as you like. But I really want Miss Theale to know,” he pursued for Mrs. Stringham, “that I
don’t figure by any consent of my own as an authority about her.”

Kate came to his assistance — if assistance it was — before their friend had had time to meet this charge. “You’re
right about her not being easy to know. One sees her with intensity — sees her more than one sees almost any
one; but then one discovers that that isn’t knowing her and that one may know better a person whom one doesn’t ‘see,’
as I say, half so much.”

The discrimination was interesting, but it brought them back to the fact of her success; and it was at that
comparatively gross circumstance, now so fully placed before them, that Milly’s anxious companion sat and looked —
looked very much as some spectator in an old-time circus might have watched the oddity of a Christian maiden, in the
arena, mildly, caressingly, martyred. It was the nosing and fumbling not of lions and tigers but of domestic animals
let loose as for the joke. Even the joke made Mrs. Stringham uneasy, and her mute communion with Densher, to which we
have alluded, was more and more determined by it. He wondered afterwards if Kate had made this out; though it was not
indeed till much later on that he found himself, in thought, dividing the things she might have been conscious of from
the things she must have missed. If she actually missed, at any rate, Mrs. Stringham’s discomfort, that but showed how
her own idea held her. Her own idea was, by insisting on the fact of the girl’s prominence as a feature of the season’s
end, to keep Densher in relation, for the rest of them, both to present and to past. “It’s everything that has happened
since that makes you naturally a little shy about her. You don’t know what has happened since, but we do;
we’ve seen it and followed it; we’ve a little been of it.” The great thing for him, at this, as Kate gave it,
was in fact quite irresistibly that the case was a real one — the kind of thing that, when one’s patience was
shorter than one’s curiosity, one had vaguely taken for possible in London, but in which one had never been even to
this small extent concerned. The little American’s sudden social adventure, her happy and, no doubt, harmless flourish,
had probably been favoured by several accidents, but it had been favoured above all by the simple spring-board of the
scene, by one of those common caprices of the numberless foolish flock, gregarious movements as inscrutable as
ocean-currents. The huddled herd had drifted to her blindly — it might as blindly have drifted away. There had been of
course a signal, but the great reason was probably the absence at the moment of a larger lion. The bigger beast would
come and the smaller would then incontinently vanish. It was at all events characteristic, and what was of the essence
of it was grist to his scribbling mill, matter for his journalising hand. That hand already, in intention, played over
it, the “motive,” as a sign of the season, a feature of the time, of the purely expeditious and rough-and-tumble nature
of the social boom. The boom as in itself required — that would be the note; the subject of the process a
comparatively minor question. Anything was boomable enough when nothing else was more so: the author of the “rotten”
book, the beauty who was no beauty, the heiress who was only that, the stranger who was for the most part saved from
being inconveniently strange but by being inconveniently familiar, the American whose Americanism had been long
desperately discounted, the creature in fine as to whom spangles or spots of any sufficiently marked and exhibited sort
could be loudly enough predicated.

So he judged at least, within his limits, and the idea that what he had thus caught in the fact was the trick of
fashion and the tone of society went so far as to make him take up again his sense of independence. He had supposed
himself civilised; but if this was civilisation —! One could smoke one’s pipe outside when twaddle was within. He had
rather avoided, as we have remarked, Kate’s eyes, but there came a moment when he would fairly have liked to put it,
across the table, to her: “I say, light of my life, is this the great world?” There came another, it must be
added — and doubtless as a result of something that, over the cloth, did hang between them — when she struck him as
having quite answered: “Dear no — for what do you take me? Not the least little bit: only a poor silly, though quite
harmless, imitation.” What she might have passed for saying, however, was practically merged in what she did say, for
she came overtly to his aid, very much as if guessing some of his thoughts. She enunciated, to relieve his
bewilderment, the obvious truth that you couldn’t leave London for three months at that time of the year and come back
to find your friends just where they were. As they had of course been jigging away they might well be so red
in the face that you wouldn’t know them. She reconciled in fine his disclaimer about Milly with that honour of having
discovered her which it was vain for him modestly to shirk. He had unearthed her, but it was they, all of them
together, who had developed her. She was always a charmer, one of the greatest ever seen, but she wasn’t the person he
had “backed.”

Densher was to feel sure afterwards that Kate had had in these pleasantries no conscious, above all no insolent
purpose of making light of poor Susan Shepherd’s property in their young friend — which property, by such remarks, was
very much pushed to the wall; but he was also to know that Mrs. Stringham had secretly resented them, Mrs. Stringham
holding the opinion, of which he was ultimately to have a glimpse, that all the Kate Croys in Christendom were but dust
for the feet of her Milly. That, it was true, would be what she must reveal only when driven to her last entrenchments
and well cornered in her passion — the rare passion of friendship, the sole passion of her little life save the one
other, more imperturbably cerebral, that she entertained for the art of Guy de Maupassant. She slipped in the
observation that her Milly was incapable of change, was just exactly, on the contrary, the same Milly; but this made
little difference in the drift of Kate’s contention. She was perfectly kind to Susie: it was as if she positively knew
her as handicapped for any disagreement by feeling that she, Kate, had “type,” and by being committed to admiration of
type. Kate had occasion subsequently — she found it somehow — to mention to our young man Milly’s having spoken to her
of this view on the good lady’s part. She would like — Milly had had it from her — to put Kate Croy in a book and see
what she could so do with her. “Chop me up fine or serve me whole”— it was a way of being got at that Kate professed
she dreaded. It would be Mrs. Stringham’s, however, she understood, because Mrs. Stringham, oddly, felt that with such
stuff as the strange English girl was made of, stuff that (in spite of Maud Manningham, who was full of sentiment) she
had never known, there was none other to be employed. These things were of later evidence, yet Densher might even then
have felt them in the air. They were practically in it already when Kate, waiving the question of her friend’s chemical
change, wound up with the comparatively unobjectionable proposition that he must now, having missed so much, take them
all up, on trust, further on. He met it peacefully, a little perhaps as an example to Mrs. Stringham —“Oh as far on as
you like!” This even had its effect: Mrs. Stringham appropriated as much of it as might be meant for herself. The nice
thing about her was that she could measure how much; so that by the time dinner was over they had really covered
ground.

IV

The younger of the other men, it afterwards appeared, was most in his element at the piano; so that they had coffee
and comic songs upstairs — the gentlemen, temporarily relinquished, submitting easily in this interest to Mrs. Lowder’s
parting injunction not to sit too tight. Our especial young man sat tighter when restored to the drawing-room; he made
it out perfectly with Kate that they might, off and on, foregather without offence. He had perhaps stronger needs in
this general respect than she; but she had better names for the scant risks to which she consented. It was the blessing
of a big house that intervals were large and, of an August night, that windows were open; whereby, at a given moment,
on the wide balcony, with the songs sufficiently sung, Aunt Maud could hold her little court more freshly. Densher and
Kate, during these moments, occupied side by side a small sofa — a luxury formulated by the latter as the proof, under
criticism, of their remarkably good conscience. “To seem not to know each other — once you’re here — would be,” the
girl said, “to overdo it”; and she arranged it charmingly that they must have some passage to put Aunt Maud
off the scent. She would be wondering otherwise what in the world they found their account in. For Densher, none the
less, the profit of snatched moments, snatched contacts, was partial and poor; there were in particular at present more
things in his mind than he could bring out while watching the windows. It was true, on the other hand, that she
suddenly met most of them — and more than he could see on the spot — by coming out for him with a reference to Milly
that was not in the key of those made at dinner. “She’s not a bit right, you know. I mean in health. Just see her
to-night. I mean it looks grave. For you she would have come, you know, if it had been at all possible.”

He took this in such patience as he could muster. “What in the world’s the matter with her?”

But Kate continued without saying. “Unless indeed your being here has been just a reason for her funking it.”

“What in the world’s the matter with her?” Densher asked again.

“Why just what I’ve told you — that she likes you so much.”

“Then why should she deny herself the joy of meeting me?”

Kate cast about — it would take so long to explain. “And perhaps it’s true that she is bad. She easily may
be.”

But this question too, on thinking, she neglected. “Why, if it’s anything real, doesn’t that poor lady go home?
She’d be anxious, and she has done all she need to be civil.”

“I think,” Densher remarked, “she has been quite beautifully civil.”

It made Kate, he fancied, look at him the least bit harder; but she was already, in a manner, explaining. “Her
preoccupation is probably on two different heads. One of them would make her hurry back, but the other makes her stay.
She’s commissioned to tell Milly all about you.”

“Well then,” said the young man between a laugh and a sigh, “I’m glad I felt, downstairs, a kind of ‘drawing’ to
her. Wasn’t I rather decent to her?”

“Except perhaps,” he after a moment cynically suggested, “that she isn’t getting much good of me now. Will she
report to Milly on this?” And then as Kate seemed to wonder what “this” might be: “On our present disregard
for appearances.”

“Ah leave appearances to me!” She spoke in her high way. “I’ll make them all right. Aunt Maud, moreover,” she added,
“has her so engaged that she won’t notice.” Densher felt, with this, that his companion had indeed perceptive flights
he couldn’t hope to match — had for instance another when she still subjoined: “And Mrs. Stringham’s appearing to
respond just in order to make that impression.”

“Well,” Densher dropped with some humour, “life’s very interesting! I hope it’s really as much so for you as you
make it for others; I mean judging by what you make it for me. You seem to me to represent it as thrilling for ces
dames, and in a different way for each: Aunt Maud, Susan Shepherd, Milly. But what is,” he wound up, “the
matter? Do you mean she’s as ill as she looks?”

Kate’s face struck him as replying at first that his derisive speech deserved no satisfaction; then she appeared to
yield to a need of her own — the need to make the point that “as ill as she looked” was what Milly scarce could be. If
she had been as ill as she looked she could scarce be a question with them, for her end would in that case be near. She
believed herself nevertheless — and Kate couldn’t help believing her too — seriously menaced. There was always the fact
that they had been on the point of leaving town, the two ladies, and had suddenly been pulled up. “We bade them
good-bye — or all but — Aunt Maud and I, the night before Milly, popping so very oddly into the National Gallery for a
farewell look, found you and me together. They were then to get off a day or two later. But they’ve not got off —
they’re not getting off. When I see them — and I saw them this morning — they have showy reasons. They do mean to go,
but they’ve postponed it.” With which the girl brought out: “They’ve postponed it for you.” He protested so
far as a man might without fatuity, since a protest was itself credulous; but Kate, as ever, understood herself.
“You’ve made Milly change her mind. She wants not to miss you — though she wants also not to show she wants you; which
is why, as I hinted a moment ago, she may consciously have hung back to-night. She doesn’t know when she may see you
again — she doesn’t know she ever may. She doesn’t see the future. It has opened out before her in these last weeks as
a dark confused thing.”

Densher wondered. “After the tremendous time you’ve all been telling me she has had?”

“That’s it. There’s a shadow across it.”

“The shadow, you consider, of some physical break-up?”

“Some physical break-down. Nothing less. She’s scared. She has so much to lose. And she wants more.”

“Ah well,” said Densher with a sudden strange sense of discomfort, “couldn’t one say to her that she can’t have
everything?”

“No — for one wouldn’t want to. She really,” Kate went on, “has been somebody here. Ask Aunt Maud — you may think me
prejudiced,” the girl oddly smiled. “Aunt Maud will tell you — the world’s before her. It has all come since you saw
her, and it’s a pity you’ve missed it, for it certainly would have amused you. She has really been a perfect success —
I mean of course so far as possible in the scrap of time — and she has taken it like a perfect angel. If you can
imagine an angel with a thumping bank-account you’ll have the simplest expression of the kind of thing. Her fortune’s
absolutely huge; Aunt Maud has had all the facts, or enough of them, in the last confidence, from ‘Susie,’ and Susie
speaks by book. Take them then, in the last confidence, from me. There she is.” Kate expressed above all what
it most came to. “It’s open to her to make, you see, the very greatest marriage. I assure you we’re not vulgar about
her. Her possibilities are quite plain.”

Densher showed he neither disbelieved nor grudged them. “But what good then on earth can I do her?”

Well, she had it ready. “You can console her.”

“And for what?”

“For all that, if she’s stricken, she must see swept away. I shouldn’t care for her if she hadn’t so much,” Kate
very simply said. And then as it made him laugh not quite happily: “I shouldn’t trouble about her if there were one
thing she did have.” The girl spoke indeed with a noble compassion. “She has nothing.”

“Not all the young dukes?”

“Well we must see — see if anything can come of them. She at any rate does love life. To have met a person like
you,” Kate further explained, “is to have felt you become, with all the other fine things, a part of life. Oh she has
you arranged!”

“You have, it strikes me, my dear”— and he looked both detached and rueful. “Pray what am I to do with the
dukes?”

“I want,” said the girl, “to make things pleasant for her. I use, for the purpose, what I have. You’re what I have
of most precious, and you’re therefore what I use most.”

He looked at her long. “I wish I could use you a little more.” After which, as she continued to smile at
him, “Is it a bad case of lungs?” he asked.

Kate showed for a little as if she wished it might be. “Not lungs, I think. Isn’t consumption, taken in time, now
curable?”

“People are, no doubt, patched up.” But he wondered. “Do you mean she has something that’s past patching?” And
before she could answer: “It’s really as if her appearance put her outside of such things — being, in spite of her
youth, that of a person who has been through all it’s conceivable she should be exposed to. She affects one, I should
say, as a creature saved from a shipwreck. Such a creature may surely, in these days, on the doctrine of chances, go to
sea again with confidence. She has had her wreck — she has met her adventure.”

“Oh I grant you her wreck!”— Kate was all response so far. “But do let her have still her adventure. There are
wrecks that are not adventures.”

“Well — if there be also adventures that are not wrecks!” Densher in short was willing, but he came back to his
point. “What I mean is that she has none of the effect — on one’s nerves or whatever — of an invalid.”

Kate on her side did this justice. “No — that’s the beauty of her.”

“The beauty —?”

“Yes, she’s so wonderful. She won’t show for that, any more than your watch, when it’s about to stop for want of
being wound up, gives you convenient notice or shows as different from usual. She won’t die, she won’t live, by inches.
She won’t smell, as it were, of drugs. She won’t taste, as it were, of medicine. No one will know.”

“Then what,” he demanded, frankly mystified now, “are we talking about? In what extraordinary state is
she?”

Kate went on as if, at this, making it out in a fashion for herself. “I believe that if she’s ill at all she’s very
ill. I believe that if she’s bad she’s not a little bad. I can’t tell you why, but that’s how I see her.
She’ll really live or she’ll really not. She’ll have it all or she’ll miss it all. Now I don’t think she’ll have it
all.”

Densher had followed this with his eyes upon her, her own having thoughtfully wandered, and as if it were more
impressive than lucid. “You ‘think’ and you ‘don’t think,’ and yet you remain all the while without an inkling of her
complaint?”

“No, not without an inkling; but it’s a matter in which I don’t want knowledge. She moreover herself doesn’t want
one to want it: she has, as to what may be preying upon her, a kind of ferocity of modesty, a kind of — I don’t know
what to call it — intensity of pride. And then and then —” But with this she faltered.

“And then what?”

“I’m a brute about illness. I hate it. It’s well for you, my dear,” Kate continued, “that you’re as sound as a
bell.”

“Thank you!” Densher laughed. “It’s rather good then for yourself too that you’re as strong as the sea.”

She looked at him now a moment as for the selfish gladness of their young immunities. It was all they had together,
but they had it at least without a flaw — each had the beauty, the physical felicity, the personal virtue, love and
desire of the other. Yet it was as if that very consciousness threw them back the next moment into pity for the poor
girl who had everything else in the world, the great genial good they, alas, didn’t have, but failed on the other hand
of this. “How we’re talking about her!” Kate compunctiously sighed. But there were the facts. “From illness I keep
away.”

“But you don’t — since here you are, in spite of all you say, in the midst of it.”

“Ah I’m only watching —!”

“And putting me forward in your place? Thank you!”

“Oh,” said Kate, “I’m breaking you in. Let it give you the measure of what I shall expect of you. One can’t begin
too soon.”

She drew away, as from the impression of a stir on the balcony, the hand of which he had a minute before possessed
himself; and the warning brought him back to attention. “You haven’t even an idea if it’s a case for surgery?”

“I dare say it may be; that is that if it comes to anything it may come to that. Of course she’s in the highest
hands.”

“The doctors are after her then?”

“She’s after them — it’s the same thing. I think I’m free to say it now — she sees Sir Luke Strett.”

It made him quickly wince. “Ah fifty thousand knives!” Then after an instant: “One seems to guess.”

Yes, but she waved it away. “Don’t guess. Only do as I tell you.”

For a moment now, in silence, he took it all in, might have had it before him. “What you want of me then is to make
up to a sick girl.”

“Ah but you admit yourself that she doesn’t affect you as sick. You understand moreover just how much — and just how
little.”

“It’s amazing,” he presently answered, “what you think I understand.”

“Well, if you’ve brought me to it, my dear,” she returned, “that has been your way of breaking me in.
Besides which, so far as making up to her goes, plenty of others will.”

Densher for a little, under this suggestion, might have been seeing their young friend on a pile of cushions and in
a perpetual tea-gown, amid flowers and with drawn blinds, surrounded by the higher nobility. “Others can follow their
tastes. Besides, others are free.”

“But so are you, my dear!”

She had spoken with impatience, and her suddenly quitting him had sharpened it; in spite of which he kept his place,
only looking up at her. “You’re prodigious!”

“Of course I’m prodigious!”— and, as immediately happened, she gave a further sign of it that he fairly sat
watching. The door from the lobby had, as she spoke, been thrown open for a gentleman who, immediately finding her
within his view, advanced to greet her before the announcement of his name could reach her companion. Densher none the
less felt himself brought quickly into relation; Kate’s welcome to the visitor became almost precipitately an appeal to
her friend, who slowly rose to meet it. “I don’t know whether you know Lord Mark.” And then for the other party: “Mr.
Merton Densher — who has just come back from America.”

“Oh!” said the other party while Densher said nothing — occupied as he mainly was on the spot with weighing the
sound in question. He recognised it in a moment as less imponderable than it might have appeared, as having indeed
positive claims. It wasn’t, that is, he knew, the “Oh!” of the idiot, however great the superficial resemblance: it was
that of the clever, the accomplished man; it was the very specialty of the speaker, and a deal of expensive training
and experience had gone to producing it. Densher felt somehow that, as a thing of value accidentally picked up, it
would retain an interest of curiosity. The three stood for a little together in an awkwardness to which he was
conscious of contributing his share; Kate failing to ask Lord Mark to be seated, but letting him know that he would
find Mrs. Lowder, with some others, on the balcony.

“Oh and Miss Theale I suppose? — as I seemed to hear outside, from below, Mrs. Stringham’s unmistakeable voice.”

Densher, after all he had heard, easily supposed him interested in Milly; but he could imagine him also interested
in the young man with whom he had found Kate engaged and whom he yet considered without visible intelligence. That
young man concluded in a moment that he was doing what he wanted, satisfying himself as to each. To this he was aided
by Kate, who produced a prompt: “Oh dear no; I think not. I’ve just been reassuring Mr. Densher,” she added —“who’s as
concerned as the rest of us. I’ve been calming his fears.”

“Oh!” said Lord Mark again — and again it was just as good. That was for Densher, the latter could see, or think he
saw. And then for the others: “My fears would want calming. We must take great care of her. This way?”

She went with him a few steps, and while Densher, hanging about, gave them frank attention, presently paused again
for some further colloquy. What passed between them their observer lost, but she was presently with him again, Lord
Mark joining the rest. Densher was by this time quite ready for her. “It’s he who’s your aunt’s man?”

“Oh immensely.”

“I mean for you.”

“That’s what I mean too,” Kate smiled. “There he is. Now you can judge.”

“Judge of what?”

“Judge of him.”

“Why should I judge of him?” Densher asked. “I’ve nothing to do with him.”

“Then why do you ask about him?”

“To judge of you — which is different.”

Kate seemed for a little to look at the difference. “To take the measure, do you mean, of my danger?”

He hesitated; then he said: “I’m thinking, I dare say, of Miss Theale’s. How does your aunt reconcile his interest
in her —?”

“With his interest in me?”

“With her own interest in you,” Densher said while she reflected. “If that interest — Mrs. Lowder’s — takes the form
of Lord Mark, hasn’t he rather to look out for the forms he takes?”

Kate seemed interested in the question, but “Oh he takes them easily,” she answered. “The beauty is that she doesn’t
trust him.”

“That Milly doesn’t?”

“Yes — Milly either. But I mean Aunt Maud. Not really.”

Densher gave it his wonder. “Takes him to her heart and yet thinks he cheats?”

“Yes,” said Kate —“that’s the way people are. What they think of their enemies, goodness knows, is bad enough; but
I’m still more struck with what they think of their friends. Milly’s own state of mind, however,” she went on, “is
lucky. That’s Aunt Maud’s security, though she doesn’t yet fully recognise it — besides being Milly’s own.”

“You conceive it a real escape then not to care for him?”

She shook her head in beautiful grave deprecation. “You oughtn’t to make me say too much. But I’m glad I don’t.”

“Don’t say too much?”

“Don’t care for Lord Mark.”

“Oh!” Densher answered with a sound like his lordship’s own. To which he added: “You absolutely hold that that poor
girl doesn’t?”

“Ah you know what I hold about that poor girl!” It had made her again impatient.

Yet he stuck a minute to the subject. “You scarcely call him, I suppose, one of the dukes.”

“Mercy, no — far from it. He’s not, compared with other possibilities, ‘in’ it. Milly, it’s true,” she said, to be
exact, “has no natural sense of social values, doesn’t in the least understand our differences or know who’s who or
what’s what.”

“I see. That,” Densher laughed, “is her reason for liking me.”

“Precisely. She doesn’t resemble me,” said Kate, “who at least know what I lose.”

Well, it had all risen for Densher to a considerable interest. “And Aunt Maud — why shouldn’t she know? I
mean that your friend there isn’t really anything. Does she suppose him of ducal value?”

“Scarcely; save in the sense of being uncle to a duke. That’s undeniably something. He’s the best moreover we can
get.”

“Oh, oh!” said Densher; and his doubt was not all derisive.

“It isn’t Lord Mark’s grandeur,” she went on without heeding this; “because perhaps in the line of that alone — as
he has no money — more could be done. But she’s not a bit sordid; she only counts with the sordidness of others.
Besides, he’s grand enough, with a duke in his family and at the other end of the string. The thing’s his
genius.”

“And do you believe in that?”

“In Lord Mark’s genius?” Kate, as if for a more final opinion than had yet been asked of her, took a moment to
think. She balanced indeed so that one would scarce have known what to expect; but she came out in time with a very
sufficient “Yes!”

“Political?”

“Universal. I don’t know at least,” she said, “what else to call it when a man’s able to make himself without
effort, without violence, without machinery of any sort, so intensely felt. He has somehow an effect without his being
in any traceable way a cause.”

“Ah but if the effect,” said Densher with conscious superficiality, “isn’t agreeable —?”

“Oh but it is!”

“Not surely for every one.”

“If you mean not for you,” Kate returned, “you may have reasons — and men don’t count. Women don’t know if it’s
agreeable or not.”

“Then there you are!”

“Yes, precisely — that takes, on his part, genius.”

Densher stood before her as if he wondered what everything she thus promptly, easily and above all amusingly met him
with, would have been found, should it have come to an analysis, to “take.” Something suddenly, as if under a last
determinant touch, welled up in him and overflowed — the sense of his good fortune and her variety, of the future she
promised, the interest she supplied. “All women but you are stupid. How can I look at another? You’re different and
different — and then you’re different again. No marvel Aunt Maud builds on you — except that you’re so much too good
for what she builds for. Even ‘society’ won’t know how good for it you are; it’s too stupid, and you’re beyond
it. You’d have to pull it uphill — it’s you yourself who are at the top. The women one meets — what are they but books
one has already read? You’re a whole library of the unknown, the uncut.” He almost moaned, he ached, from the depth of
his content. “Upon my word I’ve a subscription!”

She took it from him with her face again giving out all it had in answer, and they remained once more confronted and
united in their essential wealth of life. “It’s you who draw me out. I exist in you. Not in others.”

It had been, however, as if the thrill of their association itself pressed in him, as great felicities do, the sharp
spring of fear. “See here, you know: don’t, don’t —!”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t fail me. It would kill me.”

She looked at him a minute with no response but her eyes. “So you think you’ll kill me in time to prevent
it?” She smiled, but he saw her the next instant as smiling through tears; and the instant after this she had got, in
respect to the particular point, quite off. She had come back to another, which was one of her own; her own were so
closely connected that Densher’s were at best but parenthetic. Still she had a distance to go. “You do then see your
way?” She put it to him before they joined — as was high time — the others. And she made him understand she meant his
way with Milly.

He had dropped a little in presence of the explanation; then she had brought him up to a sort of recognition. He
could make out by this light something of what he saw, but a dimness also there was, undispelled since his return.
“There’s something you must definitely tell me. If our friend knows that all the while —?”

She came straight to his aid, formulating for him his anxiety, though quite to smooth it down. “All the while she
and I here were growing intimate, you and I were in unmentioned relation? If she knows that, yes, she knows our
relation must have involved your writing to me.”

“Then how could she suppose you weren’t answering?”

“She doesn’t suppose it.”

“How then can she imagine you never named her?”

“She doesn’t. She knows now I did name her. I’ve told her everything. She’s in possession of reasons that will
perfectly do.”

Still he just brooded. “She takes things from you exactly as I take them?”

“Exactly as you take them.”

“She’s just such another victim?”

“Just such another. You’re a pair.”

“Then if anything happens,” said Densher, “we can console each other?”

He watched the others an instant through the window. “What do you mean by going straight?”

“Not worrying. Doing as you like. Try, as I’ve told you before, and you’ll see. You’ll have me perfectly, always, to
refer to.”

“Oh rather, I hope! But if she’s going away?”

It pulled Kate up but a moment. “I’ll bring her back. There you are. You won’t be able to say I haven’t made it
smooth for you.”

He faced it all, and certainly it was queer. But it wasn’t the queerness that after another minute was uppermost. He
was in a wondrous silken web, and it was amusing. “You spoil me!”

He wasn’t sure if Mrs. Lowder, who at this juncture reappeared, had caught his word as it dropped from him; probably
not, he thought, her attention being given to Mrs. Stringham, with whom she came through and who was now, none too
soon, taking leave of her. They were followed by Lord Mark and by the other men, but two or three things happened
before any dispersal of the company began. One of these was that Kate found time to say to him with furtive emphasis:
“You must go now!” Another was that she next addressed herself in all frankness to Lord Mark, drew near to him with an
almost reproachful “Come and talk to me!”— a challenge resulting after a minute for Densher in a consciousness
of their installation together in an out-of-the-way corner, though not the same he himself had just occupied with her.
Still another was that Mrs. Stringham, in the random intensity of her farewells, affected him as looking at him with a
small grave intimation, something into which he afterwards read the meaning that if he had happened to desire a few
words with her after dinner he would have found her ready. This impression was naturally light, but it just left him
with the sense of something by his own act overlooked, unappreciated. It gathered perhaps a slightly sharper shade from
the mild formality of her “Good-night, sir!” as she passed him; a matter as to which there was now nothing more to be
done, thanks to the alertness of the young man he by this time had appraised as even more harmless than himself. This
personage had forestalled him in opening the door for her and was evidently — with a view, Densher might have judged,
to ulterior designs on Milly — proposing to attend her to her carriage. What further occurred was that Aunt Maud,
having released her, immediately had a word for himself. It was an imperative “Wait a minute,” by which she both
detained and dismissed him; she was particular about her minute, but he hadn’t yet given her, as happened, a sign of
withdrawal.

“Return to our little friend. You’ll find her really interesting.”

“If you mean Miss Theale,” he said, “I shall certainly not forget her. But you must remember that, so far as her
‘interest’ is concerned, I myself discovered, I— as was said at dinner — invented her.”

“Well, one seemed rather to gather that you hadn’t taken out the patent. Don’t, I only mean, in the press of other
things, too much neglect her.”

Affected, surprised by the coincidence of her appeal with Kate’s, he asked himself quickly if it mightn’t help him
with her. He at any rate could but try. “You’re all looking after my manners. That’s exactly, you know, what Miss Croy
has been saying to me. She keeps me up — she has had so much to say about them.”

He found pleasure in being able to give his hostess an account of his passage with Kate that, while quite veracious,
might be reassuring to herself. But Aunt Maud, wonderfully and facing him straight, took it as if her confidence were
supplied with other props. If she saw his intention in it she yet blinked neither with doubt nor with acceptance; she
only said imperturbably: “Yes, she’ll herself do anything for her friend; so that she but preaches what she
practises.”

Densher really quite wondered if Aunt Maud knew how far Kate’s devotion went. He was moreover a little puzzled by
this special harmony; in face of which he quickly asked himself if Mrs. Lowder had bethought herself of the American
girl as a distraction for him, and if Kate’s mastery of the subject were therefore but an appearance addressed to her
aunt. What might really become in all this of the American girl was therefore a question that, on the latter
contingency, would lose none of its sharpness. However, questions could wait, and it was easy, so far as he understood,
to meet Mrs. Lowder. “It isn’t a bit, all the same, you know, that I resist. I find Miss Theale charming.”

Well, it was all she wanted. “Then don’t miss a chance.”

“The only thing is,” he went on, “that she’s — naturally now — leaving town and, as I take it, going abroad.”

Aunt Maud looked indeed an instant as if she herself had been dealing with this difficulty. “She won’t go,” she
smiled in spite of it, “till she has seen you. Moreover, when she does go —” She paused, leaving him uncertain. But the
next minute he was still more at sea. “We shall go too.”

He gave a smile that he himself took for slightly strange. “And what good will that do me?”

“We shall be near them somewhere, and you’ll come out to us.”

“Oh!” he said a little awkwardly.

“I’ll see that you do. I mean I’ll write to you.”

“Ah thank you, thank you!” Merton Densher laughed. She was indeed putting him on his honour, and his honour winced a
little at the use he rather helplessly saw himself suffering her to believe she could make of it. “There are all sorts
of things,” he vaguely remarked, “to consider.”

“No doubt. But there’s above all the great thing.”

“And pray what’s that?”

“Why the importance of your not losing the occasion of your life. I’m treating you handsomely, I’m looking after it
for you. I can — I can smooth your path. She’s charming, she’s clever and she’s good. And her fortune’s a real
fortune.”

Ah there she was, Aunt Maud! The pieces fell together for him as he felt her thus buying him off, and buying him —
it would have been funny if it hadn’t been so grave — with Miss Theale’s money. He ventured, derisive, fairly to treat
it as extravagant. “I’m much obliged to you for the handsome offer —”

“Of what doesn’t belong to me?” She wasn’t abashed. “I don’t say it does — but there’s no reason it shouldn’t to
you. Mind you, moreover”— she kept it up —“I’m not one who talks in the air. And you owe me something — if you
want to know why.”

Distinct he felt her pressure; he felt, given her basis, her consistency; he even felt, to a degree that was
immediately to receive an odd confirmation, her truth. Her truth, for that matter, was that she believed him bribeable:
a belief that for his own mind as well, while they stood there, lighted up the impossible. What then in this light did
Kate believe him? But that wasn’t what he asked aloud. “Of course I know I owe you thanks for a deal of kind treatment.
Your inviting me for instance to-night —!”

“Yes, my inviting you to-night’s a part of it. But you don’t know,” she added, “how far I’ve gone for you.”

He felt himself red and as if his honour were colouring up; but he laughed again as he could. “I see how far you’re
going.”

“I’m the most honest woman in the world, but I’ve nevertheless done for you what was necessary.” And then as her now
quite sombre gravity only made him stare: “To start you it was necessary. From me it has the weight.”
He but continued to stare, and she met his blankness with surprise. “Don’t you understand me? I’ve told the proper lie
for you.” Still he only showed her his flushed strained smile; in spite of which, speaking with force and as if he must
with a minute’s reflexion see what she meant, she turned away from him. “I depend upon you now to make me right!”

The minute’s reflexion he was of course more free to take after he had left the house. He walked up the Bayswater
Road, but he stopped short, under the murky stars, before the modern church, in the middle of the square that, going
eastward, opened out on his left. He had had his brief stupidity, but now he understood. She had guaranteed to Milly
Theale through Mrs. Stringham that Kate didn’t care for him. She had affirmed through the same source that the
attachment was only his. He made it out, he made it out, and he could see what she meant by its starting him. She had
described Kate as merely compassionate, so that Milly might be compassionate too. “Proper” indeed it was, her lie — the
very properest possible and the most deeply, richly diplomatic. So Milly was successfully deceived.

V

To see her alone, the poor girl, he none the less promptly felt, was to see her after all very much on the old
basis, the basis of his three visits in New York; the new element, when once he was again face to face with her, not
really amounting to much more than a recognition, with a little surprise, of the positive extent of the old basis.
Everything but that, everything embarrassing fell away after he had been present five minutes: it was in fact wonderful
that their excellent, their pleasant, their permitted and proper and harmless American relation — the legitimacy of
which he could thus scarce express in names enough — should seem so unperturbed by other matters. They had both since
then had great adventures — such an adventure for him was his mental annexation of her country; and it was now, for the
moment, as if the greatest of them all were this acquired consciousness of reasons other than those that had already
served. Densher had asked for her, at her hotel, the day after Aunt Maud’s dinner, with a rich, that is with a highly
troubled, preconception of the part likely to be played for him at present, in any contact with her, by Kate’s and Mrs.
Lowder’s so oddly conjoined and so really superfluous attempts to make her interesting. She had been interesting enough
without them — that appeared today to come back to him; and, admirable and beautiful as was the charitable zeal of the
two ladies, it might easily have nipped in the bud the germs of a friendship inevitably limited but still perfectly
open to him. What had happily averted the need of his breaking off, what would as happily continue to avert it, was his
own good sense and good humour, a certain spring of mind in him which ministered, imagination aiding, to understandings
and allowances and which he had positively never felt such ground as just now to rejoice in the possession of. Many men
— he practically made the reflexion — wouldn’t have taken the matter that way, would have lost patience, finding the
appeal in question irrational, exorbitant; and, thereby making short work with it, would have let it render any further
acquaintance with Miss Theale impossible. He had talked with Kate of this young woman’s being “sacrificed,” and that
would have been one way, so far as he was concerned, to sacrifice her. Such, however, had not been the tune to which
his at first bewildered view had, since the night before, cleared itself up. It wasn’t so much that he failed of being
the kind of man who “chucked,” for he knew himself as the kind of man wise enough to mark the case in which chucking
might be the minor evil and the least cruelty. It was that he liked too much every one concerned willingly to show
himself merely impracticable. He liked Kate, goodness knew, and he also clearly enough liked Mrs. Lowder. He liked in
particular Milly herself; and hadn’t it come up for him the evening before that he quite liked even Susan Shepherd? He
had never known himself so generally merciful. It was a footing, at all events, whatever accounted for it, on which he
should surely be rather a muff not to manage by one turn or another to escape disobliging. Should he find he couldn’t
work it there would still be time enough. The idea of working it crystallised before him in such guise as not only to
promise much interest — fairly, in case of success, much enthusiasm; but positively to impart to failure an appearance
of barbarity.

Arriving thus in Brook Street both with the best intentions and with a margin consciously left for some primary
awkwardness, he found his burden, to his great relief, unexpectedly light. The awkwardness involved in the
responsibility so newly and so ingeniously traced for him turned round on the spot to present him another face. This
was simply the face of his old impression, which he now fully recovered — the impression that American girls, when,
rare case, they had the attraction of Milly, were clearly the easiest people in the world. Had what had happened been
that this specimen of the class was from the first so committed to ease that nothing subsequent could ever
make her difficult? That affected him now as still more probable than on the occasion of the hour or two lately passed
with her in Kate’s society. Milly Theale had recognised no complication, to Densher’s view, while bringing him, with
his companion, from the National Gallery and entertaining them at luncheon; it was therefore scarce supposable that
complications had become so soon too much for her. His pretext for presenting himself was fortunately of the best and
simplest; the least he could decently do, given their happy acquaintance, was to call with an enquiry after learning
that she had been prevented by illness from meeting him at dinner. And then there was the beautiful accident of her
other demonstration; he must at any rate have given a sign as a sequel to the hospitality he had shared with Kate.
Well, he was giving one now — such as it was; he was finding her, to begin with, accessible, and very naturally and
prettily glad to see him. He had come, after luncheon, early, though not so early but that she might already be out if
she were well enough; and she was well enough and yet was still at home. He had an inner glimpse, with this, of the
comment Kate would have made on it; it wasn’t absent from his thought that Milly would have been at home by
her account because expecting, after a talk with Mrs. Stringham, that a certain person might turn up. He even
— so pleasantly did things go — enjoyed freedom of mind to welcome, on that supposition, a fresh sign of the beautiful
hypocrisy of women. He went so far as to enjoy believing the girl might have stayed in for him; it helped him
to enjoy her behaving as if she hadn’t. She expressed, that is, exactly the right degree of surprise; she didn’t a bit
overdo it: the lesson of which was, perceptibly, that, so far as his late lights had opened the door to any want of the
natural in their meetings, he might trust her to take care of it for him as well as for herself. She had begun this,
admirably, on his entrance, with her turning away from the table at which she had apparently been engaged in
letter-writing; it was the very possibility of his betraying a concern for her as one of the afflicted that she had
within the first minute conjured away. She was never, never — did he understand? — to be one of the afflicted for him;
and the manner in which he understood it, something of the answering pleasure that he couldn’t help knowing he showed,
constituted, he was very soon after to acknowledge, something like a start for intimacy. When things like that could
pass people had in truth to be equally conscious of a relation. It soon made one, at all events, when it didn’t find
one made. She had let him ask — there had been time for that, his allusion to her friend’s explanatory arrival at
Lancaster Gate without her being inevitable; but she had blown away, and quite as much with the look in her eyes as
with the smile on her lips, every ground for anxiety and every chance for insistence. How was she? — why she was as he
thus saw her and as she had reasons of her own, nobody else’s business, for desiring to appear. Kate’s account of her
as too proud for pity, as fiercely shy about so personal a secret, came back to him; so that he rejoiced he could take
a hint, especially when he wanted to. The question the girl had quickly disposed of —“Oh it was nothing: I’m all right,
thank you!”— was one he was glad enough to be able to banish. It wasn’t at all, in spite of the appeal Kate had made to
him on it, his affair; for his interest had been invoked in the name of compassion, and the name of compassion was
exactly what he felt himself at the end of two minutes forbidden so much as to whisper. He had been sent to see her in
order to be sorry for her, and how sorry he might be, quite privately, he was yet to make out. Didn’t that signify,
however, almost not at all? — inasmuch as, whatever his upshot, he was never to give her a glimpse of it. Thus the
ground was unexpectedly cleared; though it was not till a slightly longer time had passed that he read clear, at first
with amusement and then with a strange shade of respect, what had most operated. Extraordinarily, quite amazingly, he
began to see that if his pity hadn’t had to yield to still other things it would have had to yield quite definitely to
her own. That was the way the case had turned round: he had made his visit to be sorry for her, but he would repeat it
— if he did repeat it — in order that she might be sorry for him. His situation made him, she judged — when once one
liked him — a subject for that degree of tenderness: he felt this judgement in her, and felt it as something he should
really, in decency, in dignity, in common honesty, have very soon to reckon with.

Odd enough was it certainly that the question originally before him, the question placed there by Kate, should so of
a sudden find itself quite dislodged by another. This other, it was easy to see, came straight up with the fact of her
beautiful delusion and her wasted charity; the whole thing preparing for him as pretty a case of conscience as he could
have desired, and one at the prospect of which he was already wincing. If he was interesting it was because he was
unhappy; and if he was unhappy it was because his passion for Kate had spent itself in vain; and if Kate was
indifferent, inexorable, it was because she had left Milly in no doubt of it. That above all was what came up for him —
how clear an impression of this attitude, how definite an account of his own failure, Kate must have given her friend.
His immediate quarter of an hour there with the girl lighted up for him almost luridly such an inference; it was almost
as if the other party to their remarkable understanding had been with them as they talked, had been hovering about, had
dropped in to look after her work. The value of the work affected him as different from the moment he saw it so
expressed in poor Milly. Since it was false that he wasn’t loved, so his right was quite quenched to figure on that
ground as important; and if he didn’t look out he should find himself appreciating in a way quite at odds with
straightness the good faith of Milly’s benevolence. There was the place for scruples; there the need
absolutely to mind what he was about. If it wasn’t proper for him to enjoy consideration on a perfectly false footing,
where was the guarantee that, if he kept on, he mightn’t soon himself pretend to the grievance in order not to miss the
sweet? Consideration — from a charming girl — was soothing on whatever theory; and it didn’t take him far to remember
that he had himself as yet done nothing deceptive. It was Kate’s description of him, his defeated state, it was none of
his own; his responsibility would begin, as he might say, only with acting it out. The sharp point was, however, in the
difference between acting and not acting: this difference in fact it was that made the case of conscience. He saw it
with a certain alarm rise before him that everything was acting that was not speaking the particular word. “If you like
me because you think she doesn’t, it isn’t a bit true: she does like me awfully!”— that would have
been the particular word; which there were at the same time but too palpably such difficulties about his uttering.
Wouldn’t it be virtually as indelicate to challenge her as to leave her deluded? — and this quite apart from the
exposure, so to speak, of Kate, as to whom it would constitute a kind of betrayal. Kate’s design was something so
extraordinarily special to Kate that he felt himself shrink from the complications involved in judging it. Not to give
away the woman one loved, but to back her up in her mistakes — once they had gone a certain length — that was perhaps
chief among the inevitabilities of the abjection of love. Loyalty was of course supremely prescribed in presence of any
design on her part, however roundabout, to do one nothing but good.

Densher had quite to steady himself not to be awestruck at the immensity of the good his own friend must on all this
evidence have wanted to do him. Of one thing indeed meanwhile he was sure: Milly Theale wouldn’t herself precipitate
his necessity of intervention. She would absolutely never say to him: “Is it so impossible she shall ever care
for you seriously?”— without which nothing could well be less delicate than for him aggressively to set her right. Kate
would be free to do that if Kate, in some prudence, some contrition, for some better reason in fine, should revise her
plan; but he asked himself what, failing this, he could do that wouldn’t be after all more gross than doing
nothing. This brought him round again to the acceptance of the fact that the poor girl liked him. She put it, for
reasons of her own, on a simple, a beautiful ground, a ground that already supplied her with the pretext she required.
The ground was there, that is, in the impression she had received, retained, cherished; the pretext, over and above it,
was the pretext for acting on it. That she now believed as she did made her sure at last that she might act; so that
what Densher therefore would have struck at would be the root, in her soul, of a pure pleasure. It positively lifted
its head and flowered, this pure pleasure, while the young man now sat with her, and there were things she seemed to
say that took the words out of his mouth. These were not all the things she did say; they were rather what such things
meant in the light of what he knew. Her warning him for instance off the question of how she was, the quick brave
little art with which she did that, represented to his fancy a truth she didn’t utter. “I’m well for you —
that’s all you have to do with or need trouble about: I shall never be anything so horrid as ill for you. So there you
are; worry about me, spare me, please, as little as you can. Don’t be afraid, in short, to ignore my ‘interesting’
side. It isn’t, you see, even now while you sit here, that there aren’t lots of others. Only do them justice
and we shall get on beautifully.” This was what was folded finely up in her talk — all quite ostensibly about her
impressions and her intentions. She tried to put Densher again on his American doings, but he wouldn’t have that today.
As he thought of the way in which, the other afternoon, before Kate, he had sat complacently “jawing,” he accused
himself of excess, of having overdone it, having made — at least apparently — more of a “set” at their entertainer than
he was at all events then intending. He turned the tables, drawing her out about London, about her vision of life
there, and only too glad to treat her as a person with whom he could easily have other topics than her aches and pains.
He spoke to her above all of the evidence offered him at Lancaster Gate that she had come but to conquer; and when she
had met this with full and gay assent —“How could I help being the feature of the season, the what-do-you-call-it, the
theme of every tongue?”— they fraternised freely over all that had come and gone for each since their interrupted
encounter in New York.

At the same time, while many things in quick succession came up for them, came up in particular for Densher, nothing
perhaps was just so sharp as the odd influence of their present conditions on their view of their past ones. It was as
if they hadn’t known how “thick” they had originally become, as if, in a manner, they had really fallen to remembrance
of more passages of intimacy than there had in fact at the time quite been room for. They were in a relation now so
complicated, whether by what they said or by what they didn’t say, that it might have been seeking to justify its
speedy growth by reaching back to one of those fabulous periods in which prosperous states place their beginnings. He
recalled what had been said at Mrs. Lowder’s about the steps and stages, in people’s careers, that absence caused one
to miss, and about the resulting frequent sense of meeting them further on; which, with some other matters also
recalled, he took occasion to communicate to Milly. The matters he couldn’t mention mingled themselves with those he
did; so that it would doubtless have been hard to say which of the two groups now played most of a part. He was kept
face to face with this young lady by a force absolutely resident in their situation and operating, for his nerves, with
the swiftness of the forces commonly regarded by sensitive persons as beyond their control. The current thus determined
had positively become for him, by the time he had been ten minutes in the room, something that, but for the absurdity
of comparing the very small with the very great, he would freely have likened to the rapids of Niagara. An uncriticised
acquaintance between a clever young man and a responsive young woman could do nothing more, at the most, than go, and
his actual experiment went and went and went. Nothing probably so conduced to make it go as the marked circumstance
that they had spoken all the while not a word about Kate; and this in spite of the fact that, if it were a question for
them of what had occurred in the past weeks, nothing had occurred comparable to Kate’s predominance. Densher had but
the night before appealed to her for instruction as to what he must do about her, but he fairly winced to find how
little this came to. She had foretold him of course how little; but it was a truth that looked different when shown him
by Milly. It proved to him that the latter had in fact been dealt with, but it produced in him the thought that Kate
might perhaps again conveniently be questioned. He would have liked to speak to her before going further — to make sure
she really meant him to succeed quite so much. With all the difference that, as we say, came up for him, it came up
afresh, naturally, that he might make his visit brief and never renew it; yet the strangest thing of all was that the
argument against that issue would have sprung precisely from the beautiful little eloquence involved in Milly’s
avoidances.

Precipitate these well might be, since they emphasised the fact that she was proceeding in the sense of the
assurances she had taken. Over the latter she had visibly not hesitated, for hadn’t they had the merit of giving her a
chance? Densher quite saw her, felt her take it; the chance, neither more nor less, of help rendered him according to
her freedom. It was what Kate had left her with: “Listen to him, I? Never! So do as you like.” What Milly
“liked” was to do, it thus appeared, as she was doing: our young man’s glimpse of which was just what would have been
for him not less a glimpse of the peculiar brutality of shaking her off. The choice exhaled its shy fragrance of
heroism, for it was not aided by any question of parting with Kate. She would be charming to Kate as well as to Kate’s
adorer; she would incur whatever pain could dwell for her in the sight — should she continue to be exposed to the sight
— of the adorer thrown with the adored. It wouldn’t really have taken much more to make him wonder if he hadn’t before
him one of those rare cases of exaltation — food for fiction, food for poetry — in which a man’s fortune with the woman
who doesn’t care for him is positively promoted by the woman who does. It was as if Milly had said to herself: “Well,
he can at least meet her in my society, if that’s anything to him; so that my line can only be to make my society
attractive.” She certainly couldn’t have made a different impression if she had so reasoned. All of which,
none the less, didn’t prevent his soon enough saying to her, quite as if she were to be whirled into space: “And now,
then, what becomes of you? Do you begin to rush about on visits to country-houses?”

She disowned the idea with a headshake that, put on what face she would, couldn’t help betraying to him something of
her suppressed view of the possibility — ever, ever perhaps — of any such proceedings. They weren’t at any rate for her
now. “Dear no. We go abroad for a few weeks somewhere of high air. That has been before us for many days; we’ve only
been kept on by last necessities here. However, everything’s done and the wind’s in our sails.”

“May you scud then happily before it! But when,” he asked, “do you come back?”

She looked ever so vague; then as if to correct it: “Oh when the wind turns. And what do you do with your
summer?”

“Ah I spend it in sordid toil. I drench it with mercenary ink. My work in your country counts for play as well. You
see what’s thought of the pleasure your country can give. My holiday’s over.”

“I’m sorry you had to take it,” said Milly, “at such a different time from ours. If you could but have worked while
we’ve been working —”

“I might be playing while you play? Oh the distinction isn’t so great with me. There’s a little of each for me, of
work and of play, in either. But you and Mrs. Stringham, with Miss Croy and Mrs. Lowder — you all,” he went on, “have
been given up, like navvies or niggers, to real physical toil. Your rest is something you’ve earned and you need. My
labour’s comparatively light.”

“Very true,” she smiled; “but all the same I like mine.”

“It doesn’t leave you ‘done’?”

“Not a bit. I don’t get tired when I’m interested. Oh I could go far.”

He bethought himself. “Then why don’t you? — since you’ve got here, as I learn, the whole place in your pocket.”

“Well, it’s a kind of economy — I’m saving things up. I’ve enjoyed so what you speak of — though your account of
it’s fantastic — that I’m watching over its future, that I can’t help being anxious and careful. I want — in the
interest itself of what I’ve had and may still have — not to make stupid mistakes. The way not to make them is to get
off again to a distance and see the situation from there. I shall keep it fresh,” she wound up as if herself rather
pleased with the ingenuity of her statement —“I shall keep it fresh, by that prudence, for my return.”

“Ah then you will return? Can you promise one that?”

Her face fairly lighted at his asking for a promise; but she made as if bargaining a little. “Isn’t London rather
awful in winter?”

He had been going to ask her if she meant for the invalid; but he checked the infelicity of this and took the
enquiry as referring to social life. “No — I like it, with one thing and another; it’s less of a mob than later on; and
it would have for us the merit — should you come here then — that we should probably see more of you. So do
reappear for us — if it isn’t a question of climate.”

She looked at that a little graver. “If what isn’t a question —?”

“Why the determination of your movements. You spoke just now of going somewhere for that.”

“For better air?”— she remembered. “Oh yes, one certainly wants to get out of London in August.”

“Rather, of course!”— he fully understood. “Though I’m glad you’ve hung on long enough for me to catch you. Try us
at any rate,” he continued, “once more.”

“Whom do you mean by ‘us’?” she presently asked.

It pulled him up an instant — representing, as he saw it might have seemed, an allusion to himself as conjoined with
Kate, whom he was proposing not to mention any more than his hostess did. But the issue was easy. “I mean all of us
together, every one you’ll find ready to surround you with sympathy.”

It made her, none the less, in her odd charming way, challenge him afresh. “Why do you say sympathy?”

“Well, it’s doubtless a pale word. What we shall feel for you will be much nearer worship.”

“As near then as you like!” With which at last Kate’s name was sounded. “The people I’d most come back for are the
people you know. I’d do it for Mrs. Lowder, who has been beautifully kind to me.”

“So she has to me,” said Densher. “I feel,” he added as she at first answered nothing, “that, quite
contrary to anything I originally expected, I’ve made a good friend of her.”

“I didn’t expect it either — its turning out as it has. But I did,” said Milly, “with Kate. I shall come back for
her too. I’d do anything”— she kept it up —“for Kate.”

Looking at him as with conscious clearness while she spoke, she might for the moment have effectively laid a trap
for whatever remains of the ideal straightness in him were still able to pull themselves together and operate. He was
afterwards to say to himself that something had at that moment hung for him by a hair. “Oh I know what one would do for
Kate!”— it had hung for him by a hair to break out with that, which he felt he had really been kept from by an element
in his consciousness stronger still. The proof of the truth in question was precisely in his silence; resisting the
impulse to break out was what he was doing for Kate. This at the time moreover came and went quickly enough; he was
trying the next minute but to make Milly’s allusion easy for herself. “Of course I know what friends you are — and of
course I understand,” he permitted himself to add, “any amount of devotion to a person so charming. That’s the good
turn then she’ll do us all — I mean her working for your return.”

“Oh you don’t know,” said Milly, “how much I’m really on her hands.”

He could but accept the appearance of wondering how much he might show he knew. “Ah she’s very masterful.”

“She’s great. Yet I don’t say she bullies me.”

“No — that’s not the way. At any rate it isn’t hers,” he smiled. He remembered, however, then that an undue
acquaintance with Kate’s ways was just what he mustn’t show; and he pursued the subject no further than to remark with
a good intention that had the further merit of representing a truth: “I don’t feel as if I knew her — really to call
know.”

“Well, if you come to that, I don’t either!” she laughed. The words gave him, as soon as they were uttered, a sense
of responsibility for his own; though during a silence that ensued for a minute he had time to recognise that his own
contained after all no element of falsity. Strange enough therefore was it that he could go too far — if it
was too far — without being false. His observation was one he would perfectly have made to Kate herself. And
before he again spoke, and before Milly did, he took time for more still — for feeling how just here it was that he
must break short off if his mind was really made up not to go further. It was as if he had been at a corner — and
fairly put there by his last speech; so that it depended on him whether or no to turn it. The silence, if prolonged but
an instant, might even have given him a sense of her waiting to see what he would do. It was filled for them the next
thing by the sound, rather voluminous for the August afternoon, of the approach, in the street below them, of heavy
carriage-wheels and of horses trained to “step.” A rumble, a great shake, a considerable effective clatter, had been
apparently succeeded by a pause at the door of the hotel, which was in turn accompanied by a due display of diminished
prancing and stamping. “You’ve a visitor,” Densher laughed, “and it must be at least an ambassador.”

“It’s only my own carriage; it does that — isn’t it wonderful? — every day. But we find it, Mrs. Stringham and I, in
the innocence of our hearts, very amusing.” She had got up, as she spoke, to assure herself of what she said; and at
the end of a few steps they were together on the balcony and looking down at her waiting chariot, which made indeed a
brave show. “Is it very awful?”

It was to Densher’s eyes — save for its absurd heaviness — only pleasantly pompous. “It seems to me delightfully
rococo. But how do I know? You’re mistress of these things, in contact with the highest wisdom. You occupy a position,
moreover, thanks to which your carriage — well, by this time, in the eye of London, also occupies one.” But she was
going out, and he mustn’t stand in her way. What had happened the next minute was first that she had denied she was
going out, so that he might prolong his stay; and second that she had said she would go out with pleasure if he would
like to drive — that in fact there were always things to do, that there had been a question for her today of several in
particular, and that this in short was why the carriage had been ordered so early. They perceived, as she said these
things, that an enquirer had presented himself, and, coming back, they found Milly’s servant announcing the carriage
and prepared to accompany her. This appeared to have for her the effect of settling the matter — on the basis, that is,
of Densher’s happy response. Densher’s happy response, however, had as yet hung fire, the process we have described in
him operating by this time with extreme intensity. The system of not pulling up, not breaking off, had already brought
him headlong, he seemed to feel, to where they actually stood; and just now it was, with a vengeance, that he must do
either one thing or the other. He had been waiting for some moments, which probably seemed to him longer than they
were; this was because he was anxiously watching himself wait. He couldn’t keep that up for ever; and since one thing
or the other was what he must do, it was for the other that he presently became conscious of having decided. If he had
been drifting it settled itself in the manner of a bump, of considerable violence, against a firm object in the stream.
“Oh yes; I’ll go with you with pleasure. It’s a charming idea.”

She gave no look to thank him — she rather looked away; she only said at once to her servant, “In ten minutes”; and
then to her visitor, as the man went out, “We’ll go somewhere — I shall like that. But I must ask of you time — as
little as possible — to get ready.” She looked over the room to provide for him, keep him there. “There are books and
things — plenty; and I dress very quickly.” He caught her eyes only as she went, on which he thought them pretty and
touching.

Why especially touching at that instant he could certainly scarce have said; it was involved, it was lost in the
sense of her wishing to oblige him. Clearly what had occurred was her having wished it so that she had made him simply
wish, in civil acknowledgement, to oblige her; which he had now fully done by turning his corner. He was quite
round it, his corner, by the time the door had closed upon her and he stood there alone. Alone he remained for three
minutes more — remained with several very living little matters to think about. One of these was the phenomenon —
typical, highly American, he would have said — of Milly’s extreme spontaneity. It was perhaps rather as if he had
sought refuge — refuge from another question — in the almost exclusive contemplation of this. Yet this, in its way, led
him nowhere; not even to a sound generalisation about American girls. It was spontaneous for his young friend to have
asked him to drive with her alone — since she hadn’t mentioned her companion; but she struck him after all as no more
advanced in doing it than Kate, for instance, who wasn’t an American girl, might have struck him in not doing it.
Besides, Kate would have done it, though Kate wasn’t at all, in the same sense as Milly, spontaneous. And then
in addition Kate had done it — or things very like it. Furthermore he was engaged to Kate — even if his
ostensibly not being put her public freedom on other grounds. On all grounds, at any rate, the relation between Kate
and freedom, between freedom and Kate, was a different one from any he could associate or cultivate, as to anything,
with the girl who had just left him to prepare to give herself up to him. It had never struck him before, and he moved
about the room while he thought of it, touching none of the books placed at his disposal. Milly was forward, as might
be said, but not advanced; whereas Kate was backward — backward still, comparatively, as an English girl — and yet
advanced in a high degree. However — though this didn’t straighten it out — Kate was of course two or three years
older; which at their time of life considerably counted.

Thus ingeniously discriminating, Densher continued slowly to wander; yet without keeping at bay for long the sense
of having rounded his corner. He had so rounded it that he felt himself lose even the option of taking advantage of
Milly’s absence to retrace his steps. If he might have turned tail, vulgarly speaking, five minutes before, he couldn’t
turn tail now; he must simply wait there with his consciousness charged to the brim. Quickly enough moreover that issue
was closed from without; in the course of three minutes more Miss Theale’s servant had returned. He preceded a visitor
whom he had met, obviously, at the foot of the stairs and whom, throwing open the door, he loudly announced as Miss
Croy. Kate, on following him in, stopped short at sight of Densher — only, after an instant, as the young man saw with
free amusement, not from surprise and still less from discomfiture. Densher immediately gave his explanation — Miss
Theale had gone to prepare to drive — on receipt of which the servant effaced himself.

“And you’re going with her?” Kate asked.

“Yes — with your approval; which I’ve taken, as you see, for granted.”

“Oh,” she laughed, “my approval’s complete!” She was thoroughly consistent and handsome about it.

“What I mean is of course,” he went on — for he was sensibly affected by her gaiety —“at your so lively
instigation.”

She had looked about the room — she might have been vaguely looking for signs of the duration, of the character of
his visit, a momentary aid in taking a decision. “Well, instigation then, as much as you like.” She treated it as
pleasant, the success of her plea with him; she made a fresh joke of this direct impression of it. “So much so as that?
Do you know I think I won’t wait?”

“Not to see her — after coming?”

“Well, with you in the field —! I came for news of her, but she must be all right. If she is —”

But he took her straight up. “Ah how do I know?” He was moved to say more. “It’s not I who am responsible for her,
my dear. It seems to me it’s you.” She struck him as making light of a matter that had been costing him sundry qualms;
so that they couldn’t both be quite just. Either she was too easy or he had been too anxious. He didn’t want at all
events to feel a fool for that. “I’m doing nothing — and shall not, I assure you, do anything but what I’m told.”

Their eyes met with some intensity over the emphasis he had given his words; and he had taken it from her the next
moment that he really needn’t get into a state. What in the world was the matter? She asked it, with interest, for all
answer. “Isn’t she better — if she’s able to see you?”

“She assures me she’s in perfect health.”

Kate’s interest grew. “I knew she would.” On which she added: “It won’t have been really for illness that she stayed
away last night.”

“For what then?”

“Well — for nervousness.”

“Nervousness about what?”

“Oh you know!” She spoke with a hint of impatience, smiling however the next moment. “I’ve told you that.”

He looked at her to recover in her face what she had told him; then it was as if what he saw there prompted him to
say: “What have you told her?”

She gave him her controlled smile, and it was all as if they remembered where they were, liable to surprise, talking
with softened voices, even stretching their opportunity, by such talk, beyond a quite right feeling. Milly’s room would
be close at hand, and yet they were saying things —! For a moment, none the less, they kept it up. “Ask her,
if you like; you’re free — she’ll tell you. Act as you think best; don’t trouble about what you think I may or mayn’t
have told. I’m all right with her,” said Kate. “So there you are.”

“If you mean here I am,” he answered, “it’s unmistakeable. If you also mean that her believing in you is
all I have to do with you’re so far right as that she certainly does believe in you.”

“In that case,” said Kate with her soft tranquillity, “you can do it a little for her. I’m not afraid,” she
smiled.

He stood before her a moment, taking in again the face she put on it and affected again, as he had already so often
been, by more things in this face and in her whole person and presence than he was, to his relief, obliged to find
words for. It wasn’t, under such impressions, a question of words. “I do nothing for any one in the world but you. But
for you I’ll do anything.”

“Good, good,” said Kate. “That’s how I like you.”

He waited again an instant. “Then you swear to it?”

“To ‘it’? To what?”

“Why that you do ‘like’ me. Since it’s all for that, you know, that I’m letting you do — well, God knows what with
me.”

She gave at this, with a stare, a disheartened gesture — the sense of which she immediately further expressed. “If
you don’t believe in me then, after all, hadn’t you better break off before you’ve gone further?”

“Break off with you?”

“Break off with Milly. You might go now,” she said, “and I’ll stay and explain to her why it is.”

He wondered — as if it struck him. “What would you say?”

“Why that you find you can’t stand her, and that there’s nothing for me but to bear with you as I best may.”

He considered of this. “How much do you abuse me to her?”

“Exactly enough. As much as you see by her attitude.”

Again he thought. “It doesn’t seem to me I ought to mind her attitude.”

“Well then, just as you like. I’ll stay and do my best for you.”

He saw she was sincere, was really giving him a chance; and that of itself made things clearer. The feeling of how
far he had gone came back to him not in repentance, but in this very vision of an escape; and it Was not of what he had
done, but of what Kate offered, that he now weighed the consequence. “Won’t it make her — her not finding me here — be
rather more sure there’s something between us?”

Kate thought. “Oh I don’t know. It will of course greatly upset her. But you needn’t trouble about that. She won’t
die of it.”

“Do you mean she will?” Densher presently asked.

“Don’t put me questions when you don’t believe what I say. You make too many conditions.”

She spoke now with a shade of rational weariness that made the want of pliancy, the failure to oblige her, look poor
and ugly; so that what it suddenly came back to for him was his deficiency in the things a man of any taste, so
engaged, so enlisted, would have liked to make sure of being able to show — imagination, tact, positively even humour.
The circumstance is doubtless odd, but the truth is none the less that the speculation uppermost with him at this
juncture was: “What if I should begin to bore this creature?” And that, within a few seconds, had translated itself.
“If you’ll swear again you love me —!”

She looked about, at door and window, as if he were asking for more than he said. “Here? There’s nothing between us
here,” Kate smiled.

“Oh isn’t there?” Her smile itself, with this, had so settled something for him that he had come to her
pleadingly and holding out his hands, which she immediately seized with her own as if both to check him and to keep
him. It was by keeping him thus for a minute that she did check him; she held him long enough, while, with their eyes
deeply meeting, they waited in silence for him to recover himself and renew his discretion. He coloured as with a
return of the sense of where they were, and that gave her precisely one of her usual victories, which immediately took
further form. By the time he had dropped her hands he had again taken hold, as it were, of Milly’s. It was not at any
rate with Milly he had broken. “I’ll do all you wish,” he declared as if to acknowledge the acceptance of his condition
that he had practically, after all, drawn from her — a declaration on which she then, recurring to her first idea,
promptly acted.

“If you are as good as that I go. You’ll tell her that, finding you with her, I wouldn’t wait. Say that,
you know, from yourself. She’ll understand.”

She had reached the door with it — she was full of decision; but he had before she left him one more doubt. “I don’t
see how she can understand enough, you know, without understanding too much.”

“You don’t need to see.”

He required then a last injunction. “I must simply go it blind?”

“You must simply be kind to her.”

“And leave the rest to you?”

“Leave the rest to her,” said Kate disappearing.

It came back then afresh to that, as it had come before. Milly, three minutes after Kate had gone, returned in her
array — her big black hat, so little superstitiously in the fashion, her fine black garments throughout, the swathing
of her throat, which Densher vaguely took for an infinite number of yards of priceless lace, and which, its folded
fabric kept in place by heavy rows of pearls, hung down to her feet like the stole of a priestess. He spoke to her at
once of their friend’s visit and flight. “She hadn’t known she’d find me,” he said — and said at present without
difficulty. He had so rounded his corner that it wasn’t a question of a word more or less.

She took this account of the matter as quite sufficient; she glossed over whatever might be awkward. “I’m sorry —
but I of course often see her.” He felt the discrimination in his favour and how it justified Kate. This was
Milly’s tone when the matter was left to her. Well, it should now be wholly left.